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.

Apathetic, acataleptic, anthropomorphic abstractions aided an anorectic.
Biology and botany, both broad, but bellicose blossoms bring banality.
Considered communication can conceal certain capabilities- cruelty without causality.
Delirious dreams of divination dwindle during daytime's discontinuation.
Echoing and eerie, ecclesiastical ecstasy eclipses eccentric ebullience in extroverts.
Face-to-face farewells facilitate friendships & fatigue families, familiar in fantasies.
Grace goes gardening, garnishing and ghostwriting, good god, glistening a glittery glaze over.
High, hovering, hallucinating helps habits' hardening and hiding in hazy harmony.
Introduced ideologies, indeed, illustrate ingenuity in idiosyncratic individuals I impersonate.
Jumbled and juiced juxtaposition of jitterbug and jazz justifies jovial jumpiness- jeez.
Karaoke on ketamine, a kettleful of kerosene, kindling kisses, knocking knees.
Last but not least, the lawless laying low are liberated, later learning large life lessons.
Mainly markedly meticulous, maids manage the meagerness of mess, mollifying mothers.
Namely narcotics, not either naivety nor narrow-mindedness, necessitates a nosedive.
Obligations to obtain n occupation only obfuscates obvious obstacles, and oftentimes objectivity.
Pervasive paradoxes parody people's past perceptions, predominantly persistent patterns.
Quick-witted quarrelers query quantifiable qualities, quotations never quivering or quiet
Rickety, raggedly radios ring with ragtime, rainbows remain a rarity.
Sick, staggering students suddenly spill, saucer-eyed, onto streets and scatter.
Thrown together, the tank top, the trousers, tempted and tongue-tied them, totally.
Underestimation ultimately undid the understanding of ubiquitous underachieving underdogs.
Variability in validity and value variance violates the valuer's viewpoint very vividly.
Wandering war-torn wastelands, wayfarers weaken, wait for water, wearily wonder at weather
Xenophobic xylophonist's x-ray wouldn't show his xanthopsia, xeroxed in the xanthic Xs of his eyes.
Your yawning and yelling is yellowing your youthful yearnings for yesterdays.
Zigzagging, zany zookeepers zestfully zone out with zoom lenses, to see from A-Z.

Rapidly the crows started circling under clouds,
the winter dropped it’s hemlines,
wind chimes started hanging bones and teeth
where feathers were now too fickle.
I whisper to you from a distance
who whispers to me from just below.
You went missing from my dreams.
I couldn’t recognise their forms, their frenetic
and frenzy, their motion and melancholy,
I drew the world in shades of cry, you cut me out
and walked away. The black and white figures
floating like paper planes or glued on snowflakes,
origami flowers, ornamental place settings.
You were always somehow both the paving stones
beneath my shoes and the endlessness of sky
rolled above my head, a canopy sprinkled with stars
blown from your knuckles like snow.
This is not a morning song because the sun isn’t going to rise
on this land anymore, it’s seen enough of daylight
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This is called growing up. This is called a learning curve.
A wake up call. A character building exercise
that requires some demolition before you begin.
No one can tell you if the darkness has come to stay
or if there is an exit route. Is there anybody there,
treading the waves in this night-time sea.
I hear your voice, I hear the stars coughing
quietly at the back of heaven, I hear the lampshades sigh,
the picture frames, the paperweights, the rain gutters.
Were you up there with the birds, like you hoped you
someday might be, although I hope this doesn’t mean
that you are dead. There’s a finality to being dead,
everyone just accepting the empty space that holds
your shape, the vacuum you once breathed in,
trying to move on and trying to forget the presence
of that loss, trying to forget it ever happened
or you ever happened- that you never died,
so never lived. Nothing else quite has that same
brutal symmetry that is maddeningly unequal
on one side. Dark and light. You can’t have one without
the other, yet light is filled with shadows,
and war and peace. War is a permanent state of
losing when you are supposed to be winning but
with so much losing all the time, you accept some
victory wherever you can, and then peace becomes
an arbitrary thing, a concept, a Utopia, a fairytale,
and war both real life and the stuff of fiction,
both their problem and on your doorstep.
It won’t be war or darkness that kills us.
It will be the forgetting of things, letting them
drift away and not being able to remember
them being with you still. Parts of yourself
start getting chiseled away, you are whittled
down to slimmer sets of variables, the situation
tightening around you, the doors closing, more
dead ends, more walled up corridors,
and this time, only one escape, no trap doors,
to loopholes. Hands you used to hold, you forget
who they ever belonged to. Words you used to
speak sounding now just like silence.
Wishes you used to make greying the glow
of wishing entirely until you are left with
just bones, an empty bottle, a melted candle
and a broken fountain. Those little games
you used to play with yourself, those superstitions
and fantasies, the make believe, the Peter Pan,
they become cumbersome and painfully false,
the skin they are in hardening to cold plastic.
You are already an overexposed and underexposed
and wrongly exposed photograph and you
haven’t even grown up that far yet, you still
have further the go, nobody to show you the way.
No wonder I got lost. And I have never been good
at orientation. So I found a place for my head
in the sand, and listened to the sound of the sea
in shells, the glimmer of fish, the sea monkeys
we released into the Wiltshire stream. People
want to fill the world with silly love songs
and goldfish and miniature castles. Four seconds,
flash and it’s gone, it’s a whole new world.
The sand got in my eyes, in that dust bowl of
papery scratchy anxiety, attrition against my skin,
dry and eating away at the edges of me,
until I start to collapse on myself. I should have
worked on making my skin thicker, or growing
a stronger backbone. I brace myself with wishbones
and wish that you were here, or I was anywhere
with a star to point me in one way and the moon
to change the tide, for planets to align and the poets
to smile on my fortune, write me a perfect sonnet.
Where are you now? With a dagger and a pack of
sandwiches and sardonic smile, flint stone eyes,
shadows on your heels. Where did the time go,
is it under my pillow, and if I slept right through it
how am I or was I ever supposed to know?
The clocks hold hands, the faces slip just slightly
out of position, the hammer on the nail one more time,
the forest fire that used to be contained in an ashtray?
I hear you, are you out there somewhere
swimming. Quiet now. Was it you I heard, or me?

You were high as the hill you climbed in the night
up to the dog that's a tree, all bark. The birds bite-
there's a ****** of crows- don't stop to stare
Take and make bows from those that billow in my hair.
Do you know the question marks that follow all you say
can be bent into arrows? You fire away.
You never meant to be kind but your eyes shot stars
out into the skies. We both are shooting blind,
The answers we find were never ours.
There's been a ****** of crows- feather as blade.
We put away the arrows for I was afraid
I can't say for sure whether birds died in the dark
but the pure Green Man's song was in the dog tree's bark.
As the trees protect you, Green Man folds in your arm
The birds respect you. They sing, 'do no harm'.

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.

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.

Tender and illusive, thirty thousand beams of light.
She had a cherry pit heart and the bitter-sweetest bite.
Pinpricks and clumsy kicks and a head just like a cave.
Sleep so thin and far too steep collects all it can save.
Nothing made of sound that’s real; ideas grow absurd.
From the seeds of perception- what is seen or heard?
Or how does it feel to hold on tight to the hems of mad?
Suffocation becoming softness and good becoming bad.
No one ever speaks of him, the prodigal son’s brother.
Who else gets forgotten in the shadows of each other?
If the streets were to empty and all people to disappear
How long would it take for loneliness, after relief from fear?

Words in my head grew into my throat,
violent and teeming as weeds
but the moment they disguised themselves with petals
you uprooted them,
pulled out each thought so it wouldn't deceive,
and then

a sigh, tender, as dandelions.
Blown away with a wish.
You left me blossom and
blooming with forget-me-not.

All that time spent on trains, wandering,
wondering until I knew
I've never really had a place to call home.
I found it in you
with no need to be sorry
somewhere I am welcome to come back to.
There is dust on my shoes from a different place
and dirt in the graze I got on one of my knees
when we went out climbing trees.
(It left a scar that looks like grace.)

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.

Enough,
I think I seem I am I think I am
enough,
I think,
I am not pretty.
as beautiful as water (from a tap)
but enough
of a pile of human teeth,
not grown-up but grown
from troubled daughter
(far enough from little brat)
so please, no need to look underneath
the words I say-
that's quite enough.
I think I seem I am I think
I am okay.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.
With your temperament, the world around you
and all that you’ve got invested in this life,
it is all going to rot, and the more
worms eat away the more you detest
so busily detesting that you forgot
that everything is wrong until it’s not.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.
People queuing to put their voting slip
into the ballot slot are inwardly complaining,
about whomever and what are they plan
to do and how they’ll explain, nothing is plain,
and thinking in plain terms, you forgot
that everything is wrong until it’s not.

A heart fails to start, no cry in the operation room.
Occupied by just I, this is less a home than tomb.
Maledictions in the curtain, heard from the floor.
Contradictions make uncertain what I knew before.
They pass away, pass us by, the past is left unresolved.
They disappear and go missing, cases still unsolved.

Everything is wrong until it’s not.
You thought you had it under control but now
you’ve lost the plot, you’ve lost your map and
X marks the spot and you’re selling out,
dropping out, ready to snap, you snap
at the world, it snaps back, and you forgot
that everything is wrong until it’s not.

Nothing is alright.
Life’s an endless fight.
It’s that or flight--

and the war was all around you
but the last gunfire is shot.
The bullet goes right through.
So you just keep on going too
and now somehow, despite
that on your back there’s a spot
you swear was put there: targeted
and misled and kept up all night
with voices in your head blaming you
aiming for you when you’re in full sight-
This war will all seem so contrite
When you stop placing blame,
and everything is alright.

In the operation room, the baby cries.
Anticipating doom, you told yourself lies.
You won in the end, after so many tries
You begun, in the end, to see the sunrise.
There are some things we’ve yet to realise.
Each realisation brings a surprise-

You fought so long and took on a lot

I am the dancing queen of all the eyesores
who sprang to the stars from one of the seesaws
in the moody playground where heaviest rain pours-
there’s no compensation for what the gutter endures.
When I fell back to Earth, I landed on seashores
between the horizon and an endlessness of moors.
I saw a single seagull take to sky and how it soars
and wonder about other things one usually ignores
until I seek out scuttling ***** carrying their claws
to protect them, I imagine, from the way the sea roars.
I saw a small wooden boat missing both of its oars-
that must hinder the rower wherever he explores.
After some time watching the bigger outdoors
I begin to feel sad about ceilings and doors.
But thunder comes in echoes of rumbling applause
and I don’t feel a part of it. It reminds me of wars.
The war is what happens while we do our chores,
or sit close to a mirror to examine our pores,
or pass away a rainy day completing jigsaws.
We are mutually something that the war ignores.
I skipped some stones and didn’t keep scores.
I tangled with questions of consequence and cause,
pondered my way back from fossils and dinosaurs
to a creaking house with long narrow corridors.
I wake up when the **** crows and the crow caws.
The Cheshire Cat smiles and licks invisible paws,
'We're all mad here. You think that dream is yours?'

Did you know? Cashew nuts grow on flowers,
   and they grow one at a time.

Think of the distance between railway tracks:
    this traces back to ancient Rome.

To know the true energy of the sun: imagine it
   covered all over with postage stamps,
      each square inch a bomb,
       each exploding with power only comparable
        to explosions in Hiroshima. Energy like that.

Think of this: how time once was unknowable
   for being different to everyone, until trains began
    and the post began arriving on time.

Did you know? Facts are enough to make a poem.
Where do poems grow? Do they come one at a time?
When did poems first set down their tracks?
What is the power of a poem? Does it explode?
Are poems different to everyone? Will we ever know?

There is little I prefer to the sensation of his planting two kisses
on the top of my head before sleeping.

Only now do I realise how funny planting a kiss seems,
as if all kisses are capable of growing
and if we wake up one morning
with our pillows filled with roses
we'll know that they grew from those night-time kisses.

Enough now, about all the boys and men whose hearts you stole,
how flowers sprouted from their chests
before you swallowed them whole.
Tell me about ghosts trapped in amber, about how
you can take flight driving down an empty road
with your eyes closed, at night.
I want to hear about summer lightnings
recorded on cassettes, personal but dangerous mythologies,
and winsome regrets, and if you ever sleep to dream,
if they hurt more than waking because either way,
you’re driving, and your voice is still shaking.
You were a girl born of crystals, you grew into a shell.
I think you could love, or ****, but you hide it all so well.
Red and blue lights like a prayer ending,
an exit night gave you. You are calling ‘catch me’-
will they find you or will they save you?
Aren’t you going to live forever?
Aren’t you named after a hero?
Aren’t you a modern Joan of Arc, a Titan, Michelangelo?
Swerving into traffic, smiling more with every turn.
Tell me you are racing for someone,
not imagining how to burn.
I want to ask what happened to you, but
I’m not strong enough to face what I can’t predict to hear.
I can't witness your fall from grace.
I’ll tell you that I love you, to remind you that it’s there
yet I wonder if love itself put hatred in your stare.
Don’t tell me with such pride that you never stick around
and how he loved you more, and it razed her to the ground.
I know that girl, I am that girl,
and you’ll move on and forget her.
She’ll hear the echoes forever-
*I’m like you, but do it better.

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.

but it's not worth stealing anymore
because all that glittered was never even gold
in the first place, and if there ever was a shine
it was made lacklustre with lust
and covered with rust over times that
even history books don't touch
(history repeats itself, keep eyes down,
avoid the looks, try to keep yourself from thinking
all of the men are just crooks)
and soon what you stole you see
you didn't really want that much
and soon it's getting old and your bones ache
under eyes so cold, but it's probably fake
what you thought was snow, so go
and don't make the same mistake,
don't make it twice. Did someone forget
to mention that the roads aren't going anywhere
only roundabouts back to tension,
not paved with gold? They are made of ice.

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

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.

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?

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.

Cabin fever, feverish dreamer, saw the northern lights
on one of those nights, or had they only seen her?
The gas that spirals into stars left a burn on my
elbow, when I was catching-what-I-can-before-I-go,
and I stretched for all I could reach but
I dropped back to earth, found a face full of sand
on the beach where I'd come to land with
an empty satchel. I tell myself, oh well, most days,
oh well, here's a bit of a green glass bottle,
and as well, here's a half broken shell, the same
colour as the one I only ever see when I dream.
Oh well, you never can tell with the northerners,
the lights, the stars. I had just been so sure
they were, for a long time, simply ours
for the taking. But it takes more effort than
one might suppose to visit the solar system
when most planets keep all doors closed.
I told my best friend I'd seen something or one
extraterrestrial, and she thought it was a story
I'd spun to be extra interesting. She was
right of course and I was faking, which I don't
do very well. Gut-full of anticipated remorse.

Wilting and whitening
abandoned in the sun.
I thought of dying but decided
wallowing would be more fun.

I thought to cut my palms
as if opening a letter
but then decided
cutting your throat would be better.

Figure I.
The first time you see the desert. That first time will be too much. You will be looking from the passenger window of a car the colour of sea-glass while there is someone you care about talking in the backseat about something you no longer want to hear. Mostly because the world seems to be losing its music and it’s mostly because the people in it aren’t listening. Not the way they used to, not the people you know. We know. Further down the road, everything else will be too loud or too distractingly important and there will be no music. Fearing this deafness you see in the people you grew up with, people at the same point on the road, with the same shoulders, the same bus passes, the same alarm clock calls- they don’t have to be the same any more than being in the same place- this makes people think sometimes in words that are not kind but they are true. You would give up three years of your life to be the desert.

Figure II.
Someone says thank you for being here. You turn back your head and swallow the paper ball, swallow it like it’s prayer when god isn’t watching.

Figure III.
Well sometimes it’s okay I mean they said I was too destructive too sensitive but I mean how can one person be both, if we are really just one person each? It won’t be forever no not the rest of my life but it is then I need to get over it if I am ever going to do anything or be anything or is that the same thing too? I’m sorry to bother you- go to sleep you are my favourite person I’m okay.

Conclusion.
It’s all terribly loud. Did you sleep last night? Are you comfortable? Would you like to leave with me? Stay with me? You are enough for me. The desert doesn’t care if I am not enough when there is so much space to exist.

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.

A list of images stuck in my mind:

- a well-made metaphor balancing precariously on the rooftop above a cortex
- asymmetry; namely, a piece of abstract art in a rectangular gilded frame, depicting three oranges in a disarray on a crumpled hectic tablecloth
- angry black stars twinkling ferociously in the periphery
- faces, sleeping or watching quietly from every direction, eyes following from the bookcase, the desk, even the blank walls
- the one clam that was not as happy as a clam is supposed to be
- a philosophy problem demanding to know if anyone saw you fall, with its broad chest, and nobody hears

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.

Raindrops gave me the sound of a standing ovation
to congratulate my sleeping. Slight sadness at the windows
                                             pain, slow small ache in kind applause.
Promises don't even try to disguise themselves as secrets
here between all the edges and creased pages and
                                            frenzied spills across hardwood floors.

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

Hanging out my fresh washed sheet,
I'm whiter. I forgot to eat.

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.

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.

When I wake up
my skin will be silver
the wolves won't be hungry
the wind will be sleeping
my back will lie flat across
the lace trim along the edge
of a fading dream and
my pockets will be filled
with pennies
and eyelashes
and wishbones.

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.

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.

Trying  to do cartwheels
over rough raw hands
and landing on two feet
in disappearing sands.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

How did you wear it so easily,
make your head hang so naturally?
Perhaps it's one of those things
for only some people. For some,  
mourning suits. I'm not one of them.

Tell me, how did you cut your grief
so clean in half, just like a smile I saw
caught in the gleam of sun
on a swimming pool, shimmering
in a mirage or a lifetime ago,
when the summer heat knew us
and was simmering around us,
lifetimes ago.

It cut the world in half,
divided then from now,
divided moonlight,
split open decay to allow for more decay.
We've been doing that since May.

Now it's autumn,
meaning cold feet and a pile of laundry
losing heat, and inconsolable sky
and a train pulls into the platform,
empties itself, and on a sixth floor balcony,
evening dewdrops cling
to the railing, trembling, shy.

The thud of old telephone books,
thrashing in the wind. Our bones shook,
as we went on running on, ruining
one another for anybody else.
Everybody else.

Broken leaves, gold and russet.
Seasons leave us more than people do
so why is it we don't mourn the fallen
from trees as well as wars and cars and
wars and wars and  wars.

The 11th of the 11th month at 11
they called for peace. Rest in peace.
At 11:11 I wished that someone
somewhere will soon kiss away
my idiosyncrasies
and my memories
until they sigh,
bye, bye, and you're gone
as if never here. They always say
earth is a place you didn't belong.

Cold and birdsong, chuckling
at the window. You are always there- yes you,
at the edge of that photograph
in lecture halls. in guitar chords,
in nothing-at-alls, in hospital wards.

Your face, slow-burning,
an afterimage,
across fields of morning light,
under the lapels of mourning suits.

A pile of human teeth,
that which does not belong to itself but to the night and the moon
     and the lock and the hook, that which once did belong to itself,
     or to me,
a murmur and little more,
   something you shake in the hope that answers to the questions
     you want or some reasons you've yet to find
     will come falling out,
an inhabitant in a house that becomes a crime scene during their absence and they cannot be an eyewitness,
she who wanders along the beach by the sea,
    in search of shells,
   to listen in for the sound of old echoes,
         the unreal, suspended, irrelevant,
         the night-time fragments leftover after
            daylight gets its teeth in,
       a rule-****** in asymmetrical glasses,
       one of a family of confused clowns, juggling dreams
         that were once in trees, struggling
         and underestimating distance,
a cracked window in November that seems out of place,
    a Tuesday afternoon, and specifically not a Friday sunse
    or Sunday dawning,
a wishful **** belonging in the boneyard,
housing an ocean of unspeakables in
    attic mind,
    greenhouse heart,
    cavern mouth full of sea,
the container of many unspeakables,
    a cup, profoundly sad for being always a touch too empty,
        contained inside a small glass bottle,
         a paperweight.

Isn’t this the simplicity of being? The ultimate irrefutable answer
to every question and questions only make us upset
- then I can see in my tracks
the black spot.
They said among pirates it was the mark of death
William isn’t afraid of dying and says it’s pointless
if you want it because it puts an end to
nothi

Night is like shadows speaking nonsense, exchanging secrets
that rattle between hollowed-out bathtubs and empty beds,

like a wave of dead things and when it comes in
everything is rocking,

like paralysis, being a corpse for a few second at the most but it seems like forever in a dead body that isn't dead yet,

like waiting for what is forced on you,
like being forced to watch,

like lullabies and galaxies and stories spinning on cassettes,
memories and constellations of hypnotic trinkets,

like a room with no windows or doors or way to escape
and it's too dark to see clear or think,

like when the thought escape you, breaking away
with every blink

like a fade-out on a big screen when it i black but not yet the end,

like dreading what  you don't know
how to mend, like dreading what you don't know,
like dreading that you do,

like your night-time hours getting utterly tired of you.

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?

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.