I am tired of caring
To love is exhausting
Yet love awakes me
I want loving to be easy
Like it was before
I knew what it was
And I want to love you
Like I did before
I knew who you were
Everything is inside me
Yet this everything is really
A nothingness
And it overflows
Into the ink on the page
Yet it is only a shadow, a copy
A copy of the emptiness
And now I just have
Two lots of zero
Which is still nothing
And I am tired
And I am caring
And I am not

I am the bads deliverer
And i deliver bads.
I deliver all the things that disappoint you, make you mad.
I drive my van right to your door, and arrive just as you leave
So i write a 'collect later' note impossible to read.
I deliver all the products that just aren't quite what you ordered,
Like a t-shirt just one size too small, or a photo wrongly bordered,
I miss one meal off your takeaway, give you beef instead of prawn,
I tell you 'between 9 and 12' and then arrive at four,
I fill a van with fragile things then hit every speed bump;
But the worst thing that I've ever done is deliver Donald Trump

I want to write the right words
But they all sound the same
And all mean nothing.
We have not invented the words
To describe the nothing I feel
That is not quite nothing
Not quite something
A full emptiness
An overflowing hole
The words aren't coming out write
Right
Write
All useless
All empty
All wrong

i ache for you
when drunk,
when the boundaries
i have built
melt and fall apart
you are all i think about.
all i can do is
melt and fall apart.
when drunk,
i ache for you.

a life without art
is not a life at all.
in my life, i can only
love other people's art
i can only
love other people's lives
my life
is not a life at all.

Today, I am the feeling of falling, the
jolt of the unrealised last step
on the staircase.
I

Feel myself sliding
down a sheer cliff
face,   and turning
my face away from
all   of the       hand
holds and foot hold
s that could      save
me the fall.

Below me is the river, the one
you see in films, where the
crocodiles snap and scream and
the waves are shrieking too,
where the jagged, toothed rocks are reaching
up with their barbed fingers,
they pierce the air with vows to catch the fallen
and the hero can't hold on
for much longer.

But even though i try to shape these words into the silhouette of my descent, they only seem a shallow, shadow-shape i cannot make cement; and shadows cannot beat a heart with violent fear and fierce torment as my heart beats.

my heart, my heart,
it beats, and beats,
and beats around my aching chest,
my empty chest
like some cathedral
ruin'd by time like all the rest
where stained glass windows,
scarce intact,
let in the light and make it shine
and echo 'round
the hallowed halls
and sing like some old hymn divine -

and i just need
to find the words
of this old hymn, and write them down
and shape them into poetry,
so that the lark can free be flown

but all the words i write are wrong
my aching, empty, ruined words
are clanging 'round my chest like bells,
they smash the silence, break the spell,
and yet my heart, my heart, still screams
the notes of songs I cannot sing
they screech within my chest and, though i sing,
i cannot seem to bring the notes
onto the empty page;
the page is full and still i sigh.

and so my heart will shout and scream
and beat until i die.