I still find myself
feeling your skin
in the spaces between
bed-sheet creases

and if
missing you is like
swerving into
oncoming traffic,
then tonight
I’m sleeping
in the road.

cheap makeup covered
the purple marks of his "masculinity"
forced upon her in the hours of
coal, coldness and blame.

before it got too much,
I saw her stand on her tiptoes
and dissolve into the night sky,
into the night gutters,
into the night cries,
of pills, diets and mutters.

and right as the moon
swallowed her whole,
only to spit her out onto
guilt soaked mornings;
she survived.

I have tied heart strings around my neck
and hoped the blurred vision of my
somewhat self destructive nature
would take away the optic curses
that disallow me to see what I cannot heal.

Sharpened question marks
hook into the aged rings in my flesh.
Left out for too long; forgotten.
He tries not to cry as
suspended interrogatives pull at limbs
and hang body over a myriad of "who?" or "why?"
(I forget which).

I am both the antique puppet and the
incandescent hole in the puppet master's chest,
taught to love my wooden creators
and fall in love with anything
that helps me forget about the skeletons
within my bloodstream.
Pull my strings.
Watch me come undone.

I am the poem
I refuse to write.

My skin has formed itself
as sedimented book pages,
quietly injecting
our unspoken metaphors
into my bloodstream
of Murakami, of Plath,
of everything that hurt too much
to even whisper to my typewriter.

I am a poet,
and I will type you
into the night sky.

Once,
I dreamt we ran out of lucky numbers to clasp onto
and fortune cookies to snap.
So we crossed fingers,
crossed each other's heartstrings and stars,
banned bad spirits with cheap spirits,
with middle names, middle fingers,
with the memories we learnt to love,
whilst blessing ourselves with our defects,
and laboriously watching out for cracks in sidewalks.

We called it a miracle every time
we didn't fall through.

You were my winning racehorse,
forever the prized gamble,
the writer's ache for pressed typewriter keys
and bullet black ink on paper,
the published return for insomnia incited poetry.

You were luck and
I still feel like a broken mirror.

Hide underneath the stars with me
and peel back my skin layer by layer,
starting at the cold fingertips
missing the tenderness his touch caused,
twisting up damaged limbs and wounds of my woe,
past scars from childhood stories
- the ones not meant for campfires -
and around hairs that used to stand
when your breath danced like two ghosts
- you and I -
down my neck and into my bloodstream.

Peel me back until I am nothing,
but that little boy cowering on the bathroom floor,
with flickering lights, bruised elbows,
a lump in his throat and pain in his chest,
crying for something that no longer
existed.

I'm a tongue of emerald
piercing the moon shadowed
skin of your paper neck,
paralysed, paralysed, paralysed,
painted red and almost immortal.
Oh darling, you are all mine,
from your saxophone kisses,
to every leaf you octoberly
watched fall.

you caught my broken glass
and treated it like diamond.

Every inch of our ceiling
is bruised in memory,
watercoloured blues
fade into last Summer's browns.
It hurts.
Night brings the poetry
I'm still trying not to trip over,
the written and spoken wounds
that mark my body
still spell out your favourite weapons:

1) Ginsberg
2) Naivety
3) Perpetuated incompleteness.

I am anatomically structured for
falling apart with one cut heart string
at a time; a countdown only I control.
One only you tick for.

One day you'll learn
that the world is made from tissue paper,
and tears as easily as I.

you will break the dawn
like eggshells,
cracked like my promise
and I will take the needle,
carefully knit your battle wounds together
with stories from inside
candles flamed kisses.
I will plaid metaphor and memory together
until you are the rag-doll
someone promised to fix.

she wiped away her
book quote tears
with her '98 Disney tshirt,
blaming it on the clouds,
the carousels that she feels in
*****,
blamed me for our candy floss kisses
and Polaroid memories.

I was the summer
she looked at as winter.

now hands freeze eyes and
eyes thaw roller-coaster hearts
until veins split, crack, splinter
over her bathroom floor
and fairground goldfish rust
as I call
for her name.

There are poems lingering
in the pit of my stomach,
syllables hidden in the
depths of the bags under
my eyes,
sonnets cowering in dried out
veins
and haikus dissolving, drowning
in my arteries
at the pale midnight hours
that no paper
could ever materialise.

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 are the collision of two stars,
light and dark, the light bulbs
hanging like broken poems,
from your ceiling.

Benevolent, blurred and undefined:
cocooned within eloquent dispositions
linen nightmares
threaded fingertips

escape to dizzier stars
tightened, suspended,

a constellation of misplaced stars
burrowing for warmer skin,
slack.

Collapsed beautiful,
undefined and sharpened,
collated in the fatality of eyes;
yours.
I am slipping underneath
your eyelids, dust
trapped in kaleidoscope dreams,
Our words match, do we? Do we?
My joints mix between the blue and greys
of your optic landscape,
strengthened enough to resurrect
sunken ships. Submerge thought.
Fallen perfection, put the maps away.
Escape. Blink me out.

Stars pulled from their suspends,
I watched the night bleed onto me.

The moon is just as dangerous to your
naked body,
as it still is to my naked heart;
a misfit artist perched softly in starlight,
reeling in hearts with faulty chambers.

Two aortas and the taste of your neck.

Two empty bottles of red wine
and the dark smothering something
I was never taught could shine.

Have mercy on this body,
it is learning to bend and shape,
but creaks and occasionally splits,
releases sighs from spinal aches,
the vertebrae laying lifeless, loving you so,
whispering of lip marks but no teeth,
sunsets but no rises, a bed but no you.
These aches are old, I know,
these aches are tired, I'm sorry,
this skin is a poem and
I leave unedited drafts of myself
in every bed
that has ever held me,
ever fractured me with metaphor,
abandoned with a half-cocked heart.

Take my bullets out.
Have mercy.

My fingertips bruise
Whenever I touch him,
Ribcages tighten and confine
Me to what I am to be;
Pavement cracked and crippled
Under the weight of word.
Lungs expand to accommodate him,
But he just complains about
The noise of my heartbeat.
I am sanctioned under a law of silence,
Forbidden by growth and loss,
Entrusted in splinters and expected
To heal

That year I dug up too much,
wore rose quartz memories
and stared down too many
sunsets,
felt my edges soften
and become sharp again,
the continuum of freezing
and thawing,
in someone else's hands.

That year I realised that
a name itself
can be a poem,
or a will,
or a sentence,
that mirrors assess damage,
scars resemble time,
and bones are just splintered
pieces of those I miss.

That year I was an opportunity,
a calendar choking on rotting number,
a recycled version of events,
already breathed by someone luckier.

she liked her liquor darker
than the backstreet beat poetry
she read in the cracks
of so few hearts.
she kissed storms and they hit
her back. she called it love.
she collected tears in bottles
and whispered that it was wine,
while the world ignored her,
breathed her in
and spat her out into ***** motels,
with broken mirrors
for broken hearts.

strictness ruled down,
ruled out, cursive,
signposted in Times New Roman,
the ninth letter of an alphabet
I struggle to breathe within,
the marker for my psyche,
the superlative, objective,
somewhat subjective and lost in ego,
twisted between tibia, fibula,
the pronoun scarred across
the canvas of my skin,
the myriad,
in want of you,
always needing less,
or more, or less,
an apology,
a last kiss
a hesitation;
I.

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

your words form universes of northern lights,
diluted by stars and the constellations
of your cold lips against mine.
whole mountain ranges sigh and creak,
standing on their tiptoes,
reaching for the moon, for your rhymes,
for you,
to be dissolved into snowcapped hours,
where broken typewriter keys align
with earthquakes and forgotten mistakes.
you are a waterfall, an unexplored ocean,
the yellow of maps from other people's adventures.
you are every undressed superlative
that creaks my floorboards
and casts across my walls
as starlight.

My hands entire in splits
from the broken fences
you managed to escape from.
Old memories soak tendons,
douse fingertips; ignite.

Suns set and the metals
in my blood
no longer act as a magnetic
means of reeling in our stars.
My palms are a midnight prism,
encaging bruised hearts
below broken darkness,
under thickening skin.
I no longer expect you to return.

Yet these 27 bones
still manage to remember you.

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.

Foetal positioned in the womb of her ampersand,
a child to the connected string of unholy clauses,
always adding more and more and more
and,
and,
and,
stuck in the expectation to carry on,
creaked and crusting under the weight of the words
you promise you’d put back after you used them.
It’s getting hard to distinguish between rest and end.








ъ

refract every ray of light I ever threw at you
until I'm merely a broken lightbulb
in the darkened corner of you

he leans towards sunlight
and casts shadows on
tempestuous spectators,
critics of the light,
lovers of the dark.
he sinks moonlight
into, unto, onto skin,
his hands,
la luna's voice,
breathe me,
echo me,
shine.

You perpetually "see" me shining amongst stars
and call me your entire galaxy,
whilst reminding me that the constellations
will never equate to the size
of your heart for me.

This is not starlight,
or moonlit ***.

This is dilated pupils and the ***** light of 2am
shattered on cold bathroom floors
where the fragmented coldness of my skin
freezes
the feelings you say
should thaw my scars, melt them
and heal me.

It snowed that morning,
scarring the end of something
forgotten,
pitied lost repression,
buried with each shy snowflake.

Uncontested petals from the
formerly statuesque tress, fell,
sundered,
dancing their merry little
way to the vacant ground.

And a feather dropped from
an outcast swan, alone it
forlornly
surrendered to the frigid
incapability of the terra firma.

On that Saturday morning,
nothing could have fallen,
plummeted
as sporadically as I did,
for each of your rays.

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.

I don't cry about it now.

but when he held me at the waist
I felt paper cuts carve his hands,
saw the broken glass on each side
of my "you look like a girl" hips
slice him open.

He said they looked like wings,
but where are the angels
when I slump over
bathroom floors,
with bent knees and
shattered promises?

Head tilted upwardly opened. Eyes closed.
Ceiling desired and lulled.
He is the silhouette of a dream,
Ashes and dust,
Smoke and smoke and smoke,
Carcinogenic and mine.
He opens his mouth to speak,
Smoke,
Shrouded in carbon and yearning.
He is the reason I drift,
He is forgetting who's air I am breathing
and remembering the flames I used to be.

I loved the way your secrets felt at night,
how I felt poetry between our skin,
like silk
as you peeled back my fragile incapabilities,
alive within my bed sheets
and always asked for a million
forevers.

this poem is written in past tense
and now I know how different
quiet and silent
feel.

you are so much more than
what your body confines you to be,
break the ribs,
crack, snap, fracture,
the words he formed as bones.
fly.

walking the indistinguishable
tightroped limitations of you mind,
balancing completeness
and the incompleteness
you told me was ok,
between the cracks in our hearts
until the foot slips,
the dawn breaks
and I
fall.

tell them how I felt like a car crash,
be broken glassed, be splintered,
whisper how you trod on my intention
and felt your metatarsals scream my name,
be tibia, be fibula, be fracture, be cast,
be recovery and deterioration,
remission and the carcinogenic,
**** me, **** me, **** me,
until my initials rot
in your bone marrow.

you called them my demons,
yet they're the ones who stayed
soaked in my mistakes
wanting more, always wanting
more and more and more.

virtuosic apologies sent off like
love notes in shaking fingers
and blushed up cheeks
won't save this.

I'm road ****, lost will,
broken records, creaking floorboards
complete incompleteness,
shattered and broken and waiting.
I am the metaphors
that still *******
feel like broken glass.

I went anywhere you pointed,
reached out like a baby
and crumbled at your fingertips.
you were my broken compass,
perpetuated and disorientated
by the profound magnetism
of two lost hearts,
stuck in the eye of an undying hue.
you called me the tempest
under bed covers
a tsunami waiting to happen,
treated me as the torn map
your mother told you to be
gentle with.

I have witnessed poets clinging
onto life by the skin of their own words
and the finest novelists terrified
by the bullet tick of their typewriters,
in knowledge that each click is part of
a continuous countdown to “The End”.
The late night sound of their pens scratching
upon paper not made for emotions so raw
drives them insane, urges a hunt for something
that will hurt them more than who they write for did.
I have read poems that scream “save me”
when the voices of the composers silently echo
off cold walls from therapy offices and cracked paint
in chapels that forget each of their
empty confessions.

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.

When my mother said goodbye,
she said it was getting hard to hug me,
on fear that my bones will catch her skin
and tear her open.

She says when she hears my typewriter,
it resembles my joints clicking,
when I break the spine of a book,
it simulates my future,
how it makes her feel.

I don't blame her for having nightmares
about "carbocide, nutritional cleansing"

I have stared in mirrors and felt
light avoiding my faults,
for my illness is invisible

and I am fading.

when liquid starlight formed
in his eyes
and trickled into
the formed cracks in my palm,
I was no longer sure
if I was his moon
or just a cast reflection.

A slight breeze of wind carries
Off your voice, the butterfly
Of your words drifting to a far away never,
Pinned down with a solitary needle,
Through the heart,
Love’s true dart.

Some said you were inhaled with ferocious delicacy, only to be
Exhaled into back street pubs and rented motel rooms with broken curtains for broken hearts - societies stinking breath in your eyes.

Others feared that you were the wave’s rhythm, each lap taking you to somewhere warmer,
you are the wind chill,
you are the sonnets lapping on the shore,
I hope you’re sure.

I am here
And you are further forever than I.