I write this word empty.
Squeezed dry of any meaning.
Parched and
                    
                        crumbling,
doused in my ink and yearning
for your reaction.

                                 My night
turned to your morning,
pressed letters split your skin.

You have been written dry;
I fear you no longer.

Good mourning.

I whisper poison to myself in ways only poets can,
wondering why you never asked me for the antidote.
Sat in the middle of my warzone, decomposing symphonies
formed in your ears when my poetry held you tighter than I could.
It is better to recognise your blood stains for what they are.
I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself.

I blame myself, when you still arrive unannounced at my door
with ****** knees and elbows. Shirt sleeves and split jeans.
Again, I have another hole to make whole again.
To stitch up your stars into rearranged constellations
that match the traced freckles on your back,
that do not form to spell my name,
that aren't metaphors; but the truth.

Dean Eastmond.

Let me tell you,
how I have loved and I have loved
and I have been loved
and I have not been loved
and, ****, do I know what heartbreak feels like.

Let me tell you,
how it scares me how my legs
are stronger than my heart.
I am so tired from running from him,
so I stand and take it now.

My blood no longer tastes of him,
but my coffee does,
so I let it go cold. Cold.

I let the ice seep in as a reminder
as to what he used to keep away.

Let me tell you,
how I've learnt to fly with fractured wings.
Fear me.
Run.

Dean Eastmond.

I’ve drank ***** that tasted 
better

than your biter heart

and smoked cigarettes that

smelled sweeter 
than your gut wrenching pride,

glided razors across my body

that are softer than your 
words

and swallowed pills that numb

me
more than this heartbreak.

We fell in love in a house fire;
a blaze that did not **** us,
but rather starve us of oxygen.
Left Breathless. Choked.

I was incessantly used to being
the inflammable result of too many
fractured stars in my "decadent"
bloodstream. I know I was hard to love.

I set you ablaze,
left wanting approval from the smoke
inside your lungs in shades of
charred throats.
You left me feeling like a
faulty fire escape.

Do not come to me when things
get too hot. I will burn,
singe, scald and scar,
until you are finally the ashes
someone forgot to love.

Dean Eastmond

And like the early Hyacinths
in your mother's garden,
you too will bloom as this winter ends.

I remember how you'd
lay out your November bones
and irritably scrub away carcasses
of the poetry you hated anyone reading,
until you were stone-washed empty,
bruised, cradling your mother's maiden name,
pure, pure and pure again.

Forget the perpetual mistakes
you made on midnight park benches,
where the morning dew drops
in your almost laconic step
disturbed the way dust amiably
settled upon your shadows.

You will bloom,
even in the most shadowed chamber
of your own heart.

My insides are empty train stations
Where our kisses go to die.
I have spent months rhyming
Your name with bandages
And bullet torn nightmares,
Still smiling, still growing,
Left still and surrendered
I am the rain that could not fall,
The night that did not turn to day,
The infection, the terminal,
All change, all change,
all change.