in the next ten seconds,
he opens his mouth to speak to an acquaintance in a room full of acquaintances
an ugly metal faucet that has been dripping for fifteen days drips again in an upstairs sink
he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear as she bites at her fingernails and
            looks at the magazines lined up in the supermarket
before she opens the postbox, she inhales
she throws her head back before laughing at his anecdote, her knees feeling the ache
            of being crossed for too long
with slightly tremulous fingers, she touches she sleeve of her coat without reason, feeling
            like everyone on the underground train may be looking at her
he takes a sip of water and screws the lid back on, checking his watch
a hiccup is heard from the back of a classrm
he kisses her for the first time on the mouth
he notices his hair has fallen out and sits in the shower drain
their elbows graze against one another's in the lecture hall but neither of them
             catch the other's eye, both staring straight ahead
she blots her lips over a folded tissue to remove pink residue and looks herself in the eye
             in the mirror
her father lets go f her shoulders as she wobbles on the bicycle without its stabilisers
             for a second attempt today
he notices a stain of yogurt on his tie and curses quietly
she burns her fingers whilst making toast
she argues with the cashier about the fact that selected juices were marked as being on offer
the rain rattles against the window and he is uneasy with the lack of rhythm in its sound
they put on her favourite song and remember her as she was when she was still alive
someone wipes salt from her cheeks with a tissue
he realises that the tooth fairy doesn't exist and doesn't mind because it means he's grown up
she asks her father if she is pretty and he say anything
she slips a packet of biscuits into the supermarket trolley, her mother sees
             and doesn't say anything
an elderly woman cradles his arm as they slowly cross the street
they look at one another and both know
he says I'm so sorry
she says I'm so sorry
he says I love you
she says you know I do.

little hours, 31st July '07

the clock ticks and you count your headaches.
crickets and kisses and the sounds the rain make
have become biting.
and you are weak and hollow and waiting
     perhaps, to feel like yesterday,
at the very least,
     when you were becoming something
but because you can't think about anything but how
to be existing right now.
     you don't realise that this has no ending,
it's only the beginning.

sooner rather than later, late October, '11

this was always going to have to happen
and it has been inevitable, perhaps from square one
which was an anonymous kiss
and then became occasional, and rare, and not special,
     and the first time you said it's too soon
but you can't say it again
     because then what is the point of it all
and aren't you just wasting time?
     you realise then that sometimes it's a duty,
and you have to get it over with.

summer '12

you don't think about it like perhaps you should
and you have therapists who tap their pens in concern
when you go silent should the topic arise
and you are over it, you say, and you feel their disbelief
     but what they don't understand
is that there is no choice in that either
     and you move on because you have to- and really,
is there any other option? you live with it.

late November, '13

perhaps you should have not gone silent and said something
and thought about it more, because you've had the time
but saying you were over it never meant that you were,
only a refusal to acknowledge that it's there
     and suddenly you are not a child anymore,
and suddenly you are coming up to twenty-four,
     and since those little hours at seventeen up until now,
looking in mirrors, thinking yourself back in time
wondering much of you is missing- all that time in between
then and today, where have you been?

future*

you didn't think about what you didn't have
because you were too young to know then, and never got to learn.
     whatever was lost has been lost too long to find again
take a look at your future-
keep on hoping you'll find something or someone
who will not just want it over with,
who will have other options but choose you,
who will do more than just live with it, but love it
who will be another beginning
  one day, perhaps, this beginning will make things new
       and you keep hoping because you're weak and hollow
       waiting and because you have to.
you'll live with that.

i. How the weathermen can predict happiness. Especially my mother's. Especially Swiss weathermen.
ii. I am glad that winter' is here, for finding warmth in the itch of wool, hat around ears, socks over knees.
iii. I am trapped in between walls and other people's walls and my bookcases and their bookends that may not ever end but can look like ends and ends and no no ends to the layers built in brick, all boxed in beyond this building. And my words are trapped in my mouth. They escaped from my mind to my mouth and now I don't trust them on my tongue.
iv. The strangeness of Roman numerals and the study of such numerals.
v. Is there a word for the study of numerals, specifically those of the Romans? There must be, as there is one for the act of eating whilst lying down, a fear of having fears, and the delusion that one is a cat.
vi. My wrists. No watch.
vii. Watch out for what you must keep a hold on, but know there are some things you need to just L.E.T.G.O.
viii. Morse code, S.O.Ss', plurals on top of plurals, mnemonics, anagrams, one blink for yes, lasts longer for no.
ix. Photoraph of my cousin on the day I found out she was going to die and we are kissing at the camera.
x. X for the kiss I need from the right one, or for the answer, and something telling me I got it wrong.
xi. Thinking is counter-intuitive when I'm thinking too much of absences. Silences. My thoughts don't know where to go and neither do my eyes and I can't look up because the photograph will look back down.
xii. Look at yourself. Steps: reflection; dissection; cut. it. out.
xiii. I cried harder than I have ever cried since I can remember a while ago and it's wasn't even a Wednesday or a Tuesday then, and those are my crying days.
xiv. When I get touched, I go back in time, sometimes.
xv. Transformations.
xvi. Condensation. Where do clouds come from? There are things we see everyday and we say we know exist with not a clue about how they work. How does a ball find its bearings? Where did the train begin to lay down its tracks?
xvii. Questions. Questions. Quote: Indecisions and revisions. Unquote: the more you cut it up, the more divisions.
xviii. How many parts am I divided into now? How many incisions? I can't keep count.
xix. The sun sets early in winter and the comfort of darkness is something you can count on. It stays longer, and you can count on that too.
**. Kiss kiss, one for me and one for you.
xxi. This doesn't count.

Words of warning for the future:
if you see it coming, when you see it coming
usually only when he tells you it is coming
(so keep watchful, open your eyes, your mind)
set yourself on fire and choke air
and set ablaze your surroundings should he come closer,
throw flames farther, burn reasons for him to be brave-
As you choke and he runs
from your signals of smoke
keep in mind that you are really keeping him in mind,
nevermind the cinders burning
hollows in, ash promises of love that you crave
and you know you do, in the trail he left behind
- all the trouble for him that it will save.

The average human has over 1,460 dreams per year.
2. The giraffe can go for longer without water than the camel.
3. There are 5 capital cities in Europe with names beginning with the letter V.
4. For all the continents, in their names, the first and final letter is the same.
5. The lifespan of a dragonfly is 24 hours.
6. The earth's atmosphere is approximately 150 kilometres thick.
7. The cigarette lighter was invented prior to the invention of matches/
8. Peanuts are not a a part of the nut family.
9. Your heart beats more than 100,000 times every day.
10. You are not alone.

There are few things comparable
to how remarkable it is to see
and understand
the way in which a closed fist
can become a held hand.

I wear her disapproval
on the worn-out sleeves
of a warned-about dress
and look smaller in it than anything else.
It makes me more of a mess
than I was already, it's lack of fit
will always outdo how well
I can fit into anything else
I could ever possess.

Not sure how this one will go down but I put together the most frequently used words of late on HP and saw a definite trend so devised this:*

Leaving behind another year, a tired taste
of floating mistakes, of public raging gates,
violence exposed, awful gifts to mend a liar,
backwards hugs to choke at the level of desire.

Radio decay, nuclear energy nightmares tick
and bloom into panic and the safe feel the mental sick
until pills pass from pocket to palm
and they won't cure the nation's ills
but they caress the curse until there is calm.

The cares of the chosen ones- a company
that sees the fruits of some labour and wears a grin.
In their shirt and their tie, chosen to witness
those who laboured suffer and die, but they teach
not to notice, just follow a look to your watch with a spin-

that watch, would they give it up for a real change?
Or would they keep choosing to stay blind
in a prison of pretending, and still exchange
for the price of innocent faces wearing a scar
a piece of art just for hanging, or perhaps a new car?

Left Brain

I am not a scientific test or analysis, a mathematician
or an algorithm. I am not a linear graph or a statistician.
I am the reason that you can colour inside the lines,
why you don't fall off your bicycle anymore and never forgot
how to ride it. I am the force behind your smiles-
eighteen different smiles. The reason you can hold a book
or ball and learn what to do when it's in your hands.
I take credit when you remember the name of your childhood
babysitter. Thanks to me, you can play with jigsaw puzzles
or cards or checkers or dominoes. And thank me too
for your vocabulary. You don't necessarily remember
just how it is you came to remember sequences like getting dressed
or driving, decoding or analysing. I am the reason
you can probably look at someone and learn their name.
I suppose you could complain about how I dictate your days.
How you get up, go to sleep, lend you the seconds and minutes
and hours and months and years. I am the one who taught you
time. I'm also there for you to know that it runs out.

Right side**

I am no dancer or artist made for television. Instead,
I'm the vibration you feel in the tips of your fingers
when  you make a toast and ***** your wineglasses.
Those eighteen smiles you can smile? I gave you the gift
of being able to count your crayons while you are smiling.
But it's more than box sets of crayons and toasts.
I am the reason you want to be. Everything you yearn for-
every penny you ever tossed into a fountain, every star
you have wished on, and every eyelash. I am the reason
why you prefer wearing blue to green, and why you may
fill a blank page with words for what you want, how you feel.
I am the excitement that waits for you at Christmas
or reunions. When you saw the sky full of stars, felt snow
or went in the sea for the first time, I gave you that gasp.
I am your eyes on the world. Blame me for your wanderlust.
I am not time. I am how you know sometimes
that there is no way you'll ever have enough of it.

Y.

That perfect letter.
Wishbone.
Fork in the road.
Emptied glass awaiting a refill.
If you look close enough, tiny prints of sparrows in sand.
The half of the chromosome couple half of us don't have.
A question we ask, again and again.
Second to last- almost there- in the alphabet.

Coupled with a L, and you can describe
the way in which what is done is done.

Modest X. Kiss kiss. Legs closed.
Y or N? Yes, of course.

It's a peace sign,
upside down.

Y- a Greek letter- joined the Latin alphabet after
the Romans conquered Greece
in the first of all centuries we've counted by their numerals.

Y is a double agent- a vowel, a consonant,
or both?

Before Y was given to us, we couldn't talk of someone smiling happily
or know to help someone in need quite desperately.

Before Y we couldn't ask for the answers we wanted.
I don't think we could have been happy.

I.
Last night I lost my voice, somewhere on the streets
of central London, sunk in winter, and I wonder where it was
my frostbitten words dropped right out of my throat.

II.
My vocal chords feel torn. My voice box is raw
and all worn out and when I speak it sounds as though
I was screaming all night.
My chest is tight.

III.
Everyday I realise she's not here and every day
I forget, so as far into the future as I can see
it will be repeatedly realised, like it's today's news,
that my cousin has died and that I'm not meant to be here
to even be hearing the news because it should have been me.

IV.
Fate played the cruellest trick, the most unjust card
in the pack and dealt it, when it took Ella
instead of the one who had tempted it.

V.
The End isn't anything like I could have imagined.
It's clean as a broken mirror.

VI.
Rest in peace.
Rest in pieces.
Reflection
in fractured glass
cut in half.
Splitting image.

VII.
Number seven for the years of bad luck.
Superstitions, suspicions of guilt, make for a curse.
Morning comes like hell with a garbage truck.
I miss my cousin, who left for heaven in a hearse.

Don't look at me.
When you look at me with a smile,
you must be mocking me,
silently.
Making fun. I'm a joke.
Look at me.
When you look at me, for awhile
I feel recognised,
not forgotten
and not just anyone, until I choke
on *Don't look at me.
When you look, your eyes flicker my way
you must be disgusted by me,
I'm an eyesore, an annoyance,
the space I take up, the words I say
an irritant, an inconvenience,
an offence
for just being there to see,
there to hear.
Everybody knows
A joke.
A joke.
This is how it goes
I choke.
I choke.
Look at me.
Since you woke
I've been right here
for you to notice.
Look at this.
It is fear
This fear
This is fear.

Remembering him for a while today,
remembering just how much of me he had loved
when I didn't. The things he had seen
when I didn't see the distances he went.
To the moon and back,
it could have been.

To the moon and back.
Just how much of an effort
he'd gone to just to meet my hand
across the expanse is hard to believe.
Imagine the distance between
the moon and my side of his bed.
How difficult it must have been to breathe
how arid and how vacant
it must have felt. He never said.

I'd like to ask him what it was like,
trying to get to me-
ask about the journey
but we don't speak anymore, and anyway
I know how tiring it was, loving me.

Last year, Neil Armstrong died.
They scattered his ashes over the sea.
Somewhere between the moon and tide
there is something legendary

It was 1972, the last time a man on the moon
set his human footprint in.
Since then, no one has dared go back,
and instead send lunar rovers
to explore its cratered skin
and send in the satellites that send us answers
to the questions that we have about space
and do the learning for us.
Do the loving in our place.

I suppose it is safer that way.
To stay on earth and look at the moon
and admire it, from far away.
In the arms of whoever you can love,
with the expense of something like intimacy
surely it's better to be able to love
right up close, across smaller gaps
than the span of a galaxy.

The street where I've lived for three years until tomorrow is peaceful
and twilit clouds, more grey every day than the one before, are spinning
like ghosts interwoven around the clock tower on the corner
and meanwhile, a couple share their last kiss at a station
and meanwhile, a guitarist sings underground
and meanwhile, someone asks for help but it begins to rain.
Rain sounds. Traffic. No one listens.
Meanwhile,
women's eyes disappear,
in towards the back of their minds,
into the sky.
Meanwhile,
men count the days,
tug at their ties, a knot, a noose,
and they cry.
Quietly, someone somewhere is cutting open an arm with nail scissors.
Someone is screaming into a pillow.
Someone needs to be heard. No one listens.
We are a quiet cough in the polite throat of Fate.
We are burning up the blueprints drawn up of our stars.
The news channel roars. The mute button is switched on.
We are quiet and quiet and quiet.

When the crowds started their own Kristallnact
in the big smoke, it seemed Smaller
when tracing danger zones on maps, more and more
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-
(Warning, X marks the spots that are burning)
It was a stampede of hooves money was lost on,
shattering windows and smashing streetlamps
and all the same, shrubs and roses were stormed on.
The horses don't have names anymore.
There are beings almost human
trapped in hospitals, trapped inside the women
not yet hampered by the world,
and those who created the women,
three decades before, sometimes
only a dozen years ago, somehow
still waiting and still wanting
another human being to be born.
If I could dream, I'd dance in my sleep,
but I am in the same stillness,
in the same uniform,
in search of footprints to follow,
for hunger, for scorn,
for dying flowers and an unknowable moon,
and the babies now laughing
and terrified and bored and the good ones
who fell in love with the wrong ones
or had too much, of the good or bad, too soon.
The only secret I've been let in on
is that it's the same when you die
as it was when you were born, but
all of a sudden, something small
in the churches and their clocktower clouds,
in the wires of a telephone,
in laughter in the sun,
is enough to allow sleep to come,
dreamlessly but peacefully,
inside knowing that even if we feel alone
we will always belong
to everything, everybody, everyone.

I'm not here to write romantic (when I try it sounds sarcastic)
and I'm not here to talk about the world we look out on
through eye windows- it's only earthy, it's only dust
and too much rain from too much sky
or too much space or too much city,
too sooty, too dry.

I can't find the romance in a square of tarmac
or even the rolls of sloping hills.
Give me discourse on the stratosphere-
for that is something I can lust over-
on heaven and on hell and on all the demons between.

Talk to me about the universe, per aruda ad astra.
Write something for me and show me only when I can
learn from it that there's more than
the shimmering stretch of stone and soil
between me and my appointment tomorrow at half past ten.

It's not much to ask, when you think about it
in a waiting room where minds have been lost;
It's not much to ask to want a reminder
that our lives are more
than what listlessly lolls beneath our feet
and that their prints are more precious
than just stamps on sand or concrete.

Excuse my drifting-
I didn't mean to kiss you like that,
I was just trying to swallow the space between us somehow
because I think tonight the moon was stillborn.
All the tides seem broken.

The space is dragging with plaintive collectibles=
complacency in yellow-teeth cliffsides, and all the empty shells
in which we'd listened for the corners of our ocean
and heard it ebbing, relenting, reaching.
It rippled on our skins and made us twinkle then.

Now I'm missing you, the grating bottle-glass shards
are what my headaches are made of
and are what fill up my shoes.

When our spines unravelled, I heard rain-
letter-writing weather, bathtub weather,
knitwear-perhaps-on-the-beach weather-
but the puddles were coming from the sun.
I don't know quite when summer blew in.

We would have found canvas chairs in the park.
You would be taking pictures of yellow daffodils
in black and white with your big heavy camera,
and laughing at each sneeze because I'm allergic.

There's really no need now to listen in shells
for the clutter leftover in elegy-
platitudinous phrases, photographs, plenty more fish in the sea.
Words couldn't ever weigh the depths of it.
Only abrade and erode it.

Yours is a world that, for immeasurable gaps
and for whirlpools and whale sounds,
I am not a part of anymore.
But please excuse my drifting.
I will always love the echoes
and walk along the beach in search of shells.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger again.
Forgive me, please, those who have had to wait
at railway stations or for hours outside my door
while I was flat to face, conscious but of somewhere else,
someone else, but never of dying or of war.
*Nothing to report from the bathroom floor.

In permanent ink, written on glass
he left two words
after death:
half full.

Frozen on knees, and praying
but paying no attention
to the difference
between love and reverence
and anything else you can believe in
because it doesn't matter
because you don't know
if ts inside or outside or inside out
and ghosts are only ghosts,
and ghosts are only ghosts to doubt.
Confused and scared is sacred,
so swallow.

Mirror fears mirror fear
and reflect on you to break your backbone
and polish the dust off old feelings
that you thought were long gone-
like fears in the mirror or being alone-
all cut newly clear.
Don't they only belong
in retrospect: why are they still here?
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Dust breath, blind bones, and a voice that you forgot
is growing grey, a goodbye from a whisper.
Starving for words gone missing, dreams scattered
away on waves of paper-
scattered paper-
lost thought, and it's burning.

Tongues are weak, stories left untitled
but that paper is burning
with yesterdays
and suddenly

it happens-

lips are fighting, memories filled,
old hope in new skies.

What was fading is falling for tomorrow
because the light is golden
and the waves burn clear
words that were waiting to disappear
and become unknown deep in the smoke.
The inside window was not broken.

Suddenly, all pains and panes are breaking
by the beats of poet hearts not-yet-lost,
getting back voices, breaking their insides open
to free the words yet to be written.

Writers running alone on their stories
alive for the words someday to be spoken.
Breathing clear, no smoke and dust coming in
to cloud feelings, nothing hidden, nothing blind.

Feeling all reality, all the storm and the shine,
the beauty in burning, the shine in the storm.
A poet existence- writing words that find
from the poet's heart, each beat, its own form.

Dear Daisy,, age 8, family fruitcake:
Keep at it, but don't feel proud about it.
Just keep going, because it's working.

Dear Daisy, age 11, addressed to boarding school:
You will learn something from this torture.
You will learn about forgiveness.

Dear Daisy, age 13, subject- your disappearing acts:
You are not ugly or undeserving or fat
or anything that she told you. I know you feel alone
but you could tell someone what's going and speak out
because you're not stupid if you open your mouth
and you ought to be more like what you want, not a clones.

Dear Daisy, age 15, congrats on the weight lost and gained!
You went through hell, and yes, you proved it
you can starve yourself, harm yourself, and tell lies very well
but you put the ones who love you through hell too
and you're lucky they love you anyways and for any whys
so just don't do it again.

Dear Daisy, age 17, subject: stop:
It is not your body that did this and  you did say no.

Dear Daisy, age 19, to UCL halls:
He deserves better and he's not right for you
and you're not the girl for him, you're pretending to be her
and you know it too-
You love him so much, so let him go.
That would be the kindest thing to do.

Dear Daisy, age 21, to Amber Ward, High Mental Health Institution:
You've been losing your mind for more than a year now
but you have looked and seen it's actually been far longer.
This is real now, and you haven't a clue who you really are.
With these new eyes, you can see you've made yourself up
since you were younger,
and you believed your act until it became true.
Don't look back and don't pretend you have't realised
what you can't un-see now, even though it was easier
back then when you didn't have to care.
And who knows? Maybe you will always feel this-
anxious and confused and scared,
but at least you're not fictional. You can become fact
so don't look back. That's the cowardly thing to do.
Just keep at it, like you did when you were 8
because it will work, and it will this time too
but then you were doing it for everybody else
and now, who the hell are you?

Dear Daisy, received yesterday:
don't stress and lose sleep for worrying
because you've got a Masters waiting and you don't want to get ill
and don't worry because tomorrow may be unthinkable
but it's coming. It always does,
so calm down and sit still.

There was no antecedent, no trigger pulled,
but the wound I got when it shot
was also no accident
so there is no reason to rattle me
for the answers to be shaken loose
because nothing is going to come falling out-
there are no coins of unspoken truth.
It just happened and I can't say why
because I wasn't even there.
It wasn't nothingness, just an absence
in the place where my mind usually
takes up its space. The lights were out
and nobody was there- that's not mad,
and it seems sensible, although
what happened made no sense, I know,
but I can't be a witness because I wasn't in.
Questions of why are wearing thin.

Trying to make meaning out of everyday matters
and these moments seems to mean so much to me.

Firstly, I wonder if dust matters to the dark
or city lights to stars
when they compete for its space,
and take up enough to make stars invisible,
unseen from the windows and streets
of London's nights.

And those streets, do they matter to the shoes treading them?
Does is matter to the street, being beneath them?
And I wonder whether our shoes ever matter to our feet.

What does it matter? Any of this?
Does it matter if it does?
What do I matter?
Do I matter much to anything?
Maybe I do, even to to matters I address in writing.

What makes matter out of anything?
Is our matter even real at all?
The matter of reality and wondering about it
can make matters worse
because if we are ideas instead of matter
some might conclude that this idea-life has no meaning
while others might will shrug and say it doesn't matter.

When I make make matter out of moments
by making books to fill with memories
and to document time
is there anything the matter with time I spend doing that?
Really, does it matter, either way?
We talk of it so often
but how much does time matter anyway?

What is the matter of me- what am I made of,
and is there any meaning to that?

What is the matter with me?
Everything mattering so much to me I suppose-
perhaps it's that.

Suddenly I don't need mirrors to tell me
(my hands aren't my own anymore, anyway,
not since I looked down and saw stolen gloves)
I know without reflections just how
I'm worn out, chewed out, drowned out,
called out, strung out, caught out,
spun out without a shadow of a doubt (but for self).
I'd rather be invisible than a body that I don't know
or afraid of what nobody else can see,
so I become as close to a whisper as I can be,
turn up other volumes to abrasive, stay discreet,
but it's then I hear them- their voices, hear her speak
amid the clatter, scratching out of the radio.
So even if the world did fall out from under my feet,,
I'm still here, not tired out yet- I can just listen
to anything I believe I hear in this moment- that's all I know.

Summer

Wind chimes and the clock ticks me away.
                     I am waiting for something,
                               losing other things,
                                   like my fingers
(when I pointed at stars to try and read them)
                            and my ribs, one by one,
             (trying to hold myself upright)
I don’t know what it is I am waiting for
but it has its foreshadow in the air
felt on the outskirts of my lungs.
                and now it’s inside my lungs  
                  and all the same:
I don’t belong to myself anymore.

I want to take the batteries out of every clock
because suddenly I can feel everything dying.
Running but running out of time-
but how do you even go about a tantrum
when you'll never get what you wanted in the first place.
        I must be a child or an idiot or losing marbles
        but can't help the crying, making a fool of my face.

Autumn

Hands pull me back into my sleeves
and blood runs back into my heart.
It was not something I waited for. It was someone.
                so I placed my bet on the smallest, sanest sun,
                      but still, I gathered frost
                       and shed my light
                     until refusal words were all swallowed.
They become enslaved stars
while I am realising that those I once read
had always belonged to someone else.

Winter

Gravity rolls its eyes and asks,
‘Why do I even bother?’
The universe came in and hungry
               when it expanded
                 and everything got eaten up
              until I was left with only these parts
        that belong to him
             and belong to the night-time
                and the lock.
My mind is in ashes.#
They have already been scattered.

But there was the bet I didn’t lose.
As it turned out, somehow,
in that lost state, I didn’t wage a war
that I couldn't win. .

Spring*

Love is portioned out and put in containers
and in the freezer on the bottom shelf,
next to something I made to eat later
before I can remember.
I won’t let anything melt.
I’m saving it for summer.

Masters of Science.
For doing this, am I wise
or merely foolish?

Fridge magnet poems.
Two hours he watched my mind work,
he says, "I knew then."

The faces came back.
This time, though, a rare few smile.
What are they plotting?

Train, train, bus is late.
Boiled and delicate in sun,
someone sings. I wait.

Beside greenhouses,
a gold field twinkles, endless.
I think of Steinbeck.

Crowding, reaching out,
nettles have claws here, and eyes.
Is my mind slipping?

I cry, all messy,
happy tears. His words show me
I am not useless.

Didn't I give the warning? The Danger-Lies-Ahead
and the Do Not Cross and the Turn Back Now
(if you know what's good for you)
but as I warn, I watch, and I prove myself right,
ignoring every warning, running
straight into coming traffic- and there was a  red light,
I remember there was, in retrospect
and looking at the wake of catastrophe,
I can at least say that I was correct.

The future. Although
I can't imagine mine, still-
day breaks, night falls. Time.

I was born today
but twenty three years ago.
Am I wiser yet?

Sometimes,
sometimes I scream instead of breathing

and it takes my breath

and it makes me stop

wondering what could be so frightening
that I am confusing breath with screaming.

Perhaps it's just some times.

It steals lungfuls from me
sometimes,
but doesn't everybody get scared
sometimes?

When I wake up, my skin will be golden,
the wolves wont be hungry,
the wind will be sleeping
my back will lie flat against the lace trim
of a dream and my pockets
will be full to the brim with pennies
and trinkets, catching light pretty.
In the premature summer sun
they will feel heavy, but I'd never dream
of mentioning any ache
now I feel happy to know sleep from wake.

It's warm here, close to you, but my hands
are cold. They say
cold hands                            (warm heart)
so that could possibly explain away what's past
with something a little more than
the stencil marks and sterile string
sewing me and all my fault lines in
to shapes, telling stories on my skin?

They will always tell on me, telling tales
on my head, to different heads,
about wherever my head has been,
but still, you take my cold hands between
your own warm hands and I don't know
if its the cold or the heat that seems
to make my cheeks go red,
but we rely on friction to make things warm.

It's a strange thing to think that there is a way
but it only works because of all the ways that won't-
when nothing fits together, but this.

I broke every mirror trying to climb backwards
in time and into a world where I attacked him.

Here's what I have learnt about the phonetics of loss.
They sound something like this:
(which is to say, silence)
it's a note I've never heard anyone sing
and it's note that someday I will find,
come morning, sleep has left behind.
This sound, like those in an old lullaby
until found, I can know only as goodbye,
as milkteeth underneath a cotton pillow,
as the sounds that I hear now:
(the black bedtime echo).

Finding the words is like trying
to find a single vein
in the vineyard of your body.

The whole day

is a feeling,
and the words are all caught
at the front gates,

teeth.

It feels like knowing Polish
without being able to speak Polish.

Partially lit and yellowing,
seeping in from night, the morning
stale leftover hours, all spent ignoring
the tsunami, the taps
on a shoulder, a warning.

It seems I've filled these grown-up shoes
but I don't know when I grew
because yesterday I was still seventeen
and today I am really twenty-two.

Here it is.

Here is the hole in the stitches of your warmest sleeve.
Here is the emptiness of ice.
Here is the sound that only the loneliest make.

There it goes.

There is the sun, drunk on days, whirling.
There is the delirium that comes sultry with fever.
There is the aching overwhelm of blood returning.

That was the anaesthesia.
Here is the morning after.

I don't like this time of year-
summer's breath down my neck,
chased up sleepless from shorter nights,
tired and dry,
hands that were shaken by day,
the one before
still aching and sore-

day breaks to brittle hours-

sunlight strips, sandpaper scratches,
at the corner of an eye
and all the clutter catches
at the throat's back, dust kicked up
from summer's track-

day breaks the thirsty flowers.

You told me to look the universe right in the eye
but I don't think I'm brave enough,
not quite yet, because all I am thinking
is about what you found when you looked
and saw the nucleus, everything-
all the feral electons- around it, and
the things you once thought you could hold
slipping away from you, from the spaces
hollowed out of you, until you finally felt it:
the emptiness of space.

The night knows all my secrets.
Sometime plucked out from in-between
illusory stars where there were no dreams
during that night just past,
I misplaced myself-
again.
This morning I find fragments
scattered about-
don't remember
anything breaking-
kitchen counter, bathroom tiles,
stairs, crumples on the carpet.
Never in one piece.
All I would want is to find tiny bits,
tiny pieces, in characters
and in phrases imprinted
upon the pages upon pages
of a thousand books
until I'm whole-
again?
Just keep reading.
One day all the nights will have my story to tell.

Things can be beautiful when falling apart
and not always reason for crying.
Just think of a leaf broken free from a tree
or the soft sounds of floorboards, sighing.

I.
Written a couple of years ago

For a moment she was a beat of nostalgia
disappearing
on the end of his tongue,
then misplaced- like a receipt underneath an ashtray

- or was she replaced?
He gave up smoking
and he's growing orchids now.

II.*
written for my best friend, recently, in response to a poem of his called 'i used to be his man*

Do you remember what time was like
before all of this began,
when I wasn't afraid of sleeping
and you wouldn't want to be anyone's man?

A stumble first, one of many, but then the thin-thin-
thinking-ridiculous-manic-hideous-and-forgot-
ten times as bad as it used to be, as it was be-
four times as loud as your in-
tension headaches, and those other pain-
fulfilling nothing so you really can't com-
plain and simple, nothing all that spec-
shall we try again, once over? Try a sec­ond t-
I'm not enough, I don't think, to  be some-
one stumble, this one time, another time, and it's one of many.