Underneath these artless skies
I marry the ghost within you
because the stories are now
screaming mad, and dark,
and every time your name
rolls unto my tongue, it thunders,
and I tremble, and tremble,
and like a thousand ships set against
the tide, I will my eyes to sleep;
cold as ice, mother, pray tell
how does one go to sleep when
Thanatos is the one weaving the
blanket; rather awake than dead;
half a heart than half a soul;
tell me if I open you up I'll find anything
other than flesh, other than nothingness;
you're so vacant and uninhabited, I forget
you're not an abandoned building;
tell me how I can go to sleep
without being woken up by the ghost
of you in my head, dancing to music
we once made when we touched; I'll
revisit those little joys, and maybe I'll
understand why empty vessels make
the loudest noise.

The night unravelling,
caught in the moment of the earth's
dance on its tilt

when it's just as day
as it is the night; like light
appearing behind shut eyelids

who am I to trust
when the earth turns and dreams
turn into daytime reveries

will I wake up and forget
or will your elbow slide off the table
and break the spell?

This time is a perfidious lover,
so tell me,
whose side is it on

tonight?

The car will edge past the truck maybe
and maybe we'll survive this message
playing on repeat, apologies like daft lilies
and then you go ahead and tell me that you've never
learnt from your mistakes, or my mistakes.
That mistakes are only bad unless you change the order
of analogy. This experiment has been contaminated.
Now a fresh batch. Trust me, there's a point to this.
I'm counting back from a hundred and two
and you've got me standing in the middle of the highway,
blindfolded; this is what loving you felt like,
you said. But I think it was more dramatic in my head.
Nuclear fission and the seige of Dresden dressed
up playing Adagio in D minor; I'm dust. I'm dust.
I've become ash and misery and I'm trying to stay inside you
but you've been coughing a lot, and who's to say
you were holding your breath for something exciting,
I just know for a fact that at the end of this beep,
you'll know what to do and yet
you're not going to leave another message.

My name spells love in every language
you say you’ve learnt; the pulsating
streets of your veins are alight with life tonight.

We walk them with empty-pockets and
hand-in-hand; the only crimes we commit
is that we lead each other to dark places;

a castle of lies; half-said the only loving
we’ve done is in our heads.
We lose time in words and suddenly

it’s four a.m. and the coldest hands
have only ever been yours; all that throbbing
gone to waste. Rest your heart

with me, it’s never lost; four a.m.
is your hour with me
because you’ll sleep and awake

and we’ll become thieves of conversations
stealing emotions we hide in jokes
and the sundry ‘have a nice day’s.

This is where the heart lies:
softly in the hands of rhyme
and meter; we've made a shrine
out of syntax and code.
We tell stories and we sing songs
about life and love, and this
is where some of us grow up,
this is where some of us die a little
each day.

This is our home, not your playground,
so keep your fights
out of here.

I.

No, don't go now. Please
don't go now; the fog is creating ghosts
out of people and we're breathing clouds out of our mouths.
Tell me about that time when you held your breath
under the lake for six years and still survived;
tell me how if I do that, it'll never work.
I'm not a sea God
any more.

II.

My knees tell better stories than my tongue
ever did, please don't; wretched hive harangues
the mind in a plague, can't you see I'm holding you down
and telling you you're all I ever wanted,
you're all I ever wanted; your head is the stuff of dreams
you're all I ever wanted; you can put your arm
right through me and only feel mist;
I am fog. I'm creating ghosts out of you.

III.

Make it up to me in a rainbow of hues of grey;
at the end of it I'm holding my ribs open. I've never
been more colourful and sad at the same time.
You're the mirrors to my house; stay
has always sounded better than don't go

yet neither seems to work anymore.