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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"that's not poetry, that's shattered glass
and half empty ***** bottles"

"you're not a poet,
you're smashed, broken
and hiding between words, names,
typewriter keys and his handwriting.

you're all broken remains,
a skeleton trapped in skin,
and it's cut me to the bone"

your absence
is the hand,
clawed
at the back of my neck,
holding my head under
darkened water,

you really wanted me
to drown for you,
didn't you?

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.

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.

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

i) my father never taught me how to shave, so I guess
that’s why a razor to him and I are two separate entities;
a symbol of his pride yet a symbol of my sorrow.

ii) and it’s not my mother’s fault that I am the way I am,
neither is it my own. but when my wrists twitch at the hour
when I miss the way she used to smile; I blame myself.

iii) they say family is in your blood and that will never change.

iv) if so, I am related to healing wounds and the wisdom-less
circles of the trunk of a mind not made for the kind of tired
sleep can never cure. I am the father of my own mistakes
and forever the child of a forever without a beginning.

v) not even the poetry in my arteries can save me now.

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 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.

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 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.

she carried just enough hope,
a little too little memory and wish,
cupped in the warmth of her hands
in broken hours of lavender
as her stomach quivered
like the mountains that grounded her
to a perpetual state of being,
of what she's told to call "home".

moonlight and stars,
waves and oceans
have all been used up
in other people's heartaches.

she missed the road, missed him,
missed "the platonic love of new"
not like constellations and ocean ripples,
but like Kerouac's typewriter
misses his caress.

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?

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 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.

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.

Images of you burn
like birthing nebulas
in the charred retinas of my eyes,
shining perpetuated light
through every part of me
I forgot to love.

Cast shadows and moons
over the night sky's critic,
and let your shadowy mistakes
come undone.

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’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’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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I loved the way your secrets felt at night,
how poetry formed between our skin
as you peeled back my flaws
like fine silk and red wine,
I loved how alive you were
within my bed sheets
always asking for a million more
forevers.

This is written in past tense
and painfully taught me
how different
quiet and silent,
really feel.

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.

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.

the moon wrapped itself
around your face,
as if like a mask,
protecting you from the monsters,
hiding something that I still don't know,
as street lights dissolved,
silently, oh so quietly,
into the night sky,
contesting and wishing
to become the stars held together
with moments like this
and that and who and where:
I'm still
not there.