It always starts and ends like this
You with your small death
And my killing kiss
The inertia of planets and gravity’s sway
I orbit around you
And you dance away
My nightmare, my haunting
My trespassing ghost
I beg for your touch
Like a too-willing host
The stars fall to Earth
Like knives to the flesh
My meteorite king
Know that I loved you best

Sometimes, in the shower
I think of all the hands I have let touch me
And have to scrub myself so hard my skin blisters,
Use my nails like a blunt knife, try to tear into a new skin
One they have never seen
I'm reminded of all the ways I have said no with my body,
All the times it was ignored,
And turn the water so hot I feel hell singing in my blood.
I hear all the ways I said no with my tongue,
All the times it was ignored,
Bite down on lips that never spoke loud enough
I’d sever this useless muscle from my mouth
If only I hadn’t already hidden the razors.
But sometimes, in the shower
I think of the times I have touched myself
Ran fingers over a soft-skinned body
That could not do more to save me
And I remind myself that this precipice of hatred,
The dancing cliff-edge of blaming myself
Should not lead to scars and blood in the drain
I think of all the ways the water has held me
Has embraced me for hours and asked me to give nothing in return
In these moments I know a body is just flesh
This sinew and marrow carcass of me
Is blameless for the reaching hands
Of the ****** and rotten bodies of them
It’s just a frightened body
And I forgive it
I forgive it

I have always been a honeybee girl
Full of buzzing anger
Turning it into sweet gold
My honeycomb kisses and little sting
A war of creation and destruction
I die with every battle I have ever fought
And return again come the golden dawn
Humming softly and sitting delicate
Perched on colour
Hoping some of it could leak
Into the grey of my nightly ruin
How do I take all this sound
In my throat, these charged words
Of fury and weave them into glory
How do I bestow a sugared kiss
And not the killing sting
Yellow and black and frightful
The colours of warning,
War paint on my cheeks
Come no closer to my heart,
I’m busy

The dust outline of you
On the other half of this bed
Blows away in the wind
Leaking through the window
It’s always storming outside
The rain keeps me up at night
Howling and shrieking against the house
In my dreams you’re next to me
But shakey like seeing you
Through water, like drowning
December always has the sense
Of falling through ice
In this bed you're reaching through to me
Fists slamming against the barrier
The whole world swirling outside around us
I wake up coughing and choking
Water dripping from my lips
Silence to the night, no rain, not one drop,
The howling
The shrieking
It was just me

I fall down my throat
Into the last standing pillars
Of my body, that was a city
Atlantis and I, both sinking
I take all benevolent queen in me
Whisper wakefulness to my sleeping parts
Listen for the whirrs and chimes
Of my whole heart coming alive again
I can hear the lioness of my lungs chatting with the magpies
All the birds singing in harmony
The tree that grew from the apple seeds I swallowed
Refuses to drop its leaves, even as winter
Tries to choke this body
I am walking through gardens
All the beasts that used to gnaw at my bones while I slept
Nudge at my hands and lead me through this Eden
Like Atlantis, I find myself lost
Like Atlantis, I find no desire to return to the surface
All the birds singing in harmony
And happiness, in every step
Happiness