Ship’s tipping,
children crying,
water lapping
against my feet -
summer-side beach shores
flashing Polaroids
through clasped hands
in false prayer.

You,
atop the bank
rough hands; calloused
grabbing the rail
as you hang onto the upper hand.

No longer horizontal,
ripped apart from the domestic bed,
your chants to God
beg Him to take my life,
and spare yours –

It’s easier to be the underdog
when everyone else is falling, too;
I am the water,
I wait to lap you up;
please, I ask,
fall onto me
and let me love you to death.

In short, sink.
In shorter, drown.

Venus’ poisonous breath -
invisible –
catches itself on the ice
of purged rain
and falls.

Crystallising venom;
no arrow-hearts,
just the invisible ****** weapon
of a sacrificial lamb’s leg
to beat love into submission.

Scorned lovers’ scorned love
aches in the twilight
of the in-between radio stations
where Venus spits songs
about eternal rainfall
and dying in a bathtub of blood
for non-poetic non-love.

Gods laugh
at self-help books
and the implication
that anything at all
is the same
as the last
time the world ended.

Beautiful Venus,
with smoke in her eyes
and golden skin,
waits for men to burn
under her;
laughing and lying
in one breath,
catching and falling again.

Havisham’s hands are ******
with the half-squeezed heart
blackened by falsity,
like thick red paint,
her crackling fingertips
keep moulding something invincible;
the permanence of lying.

Altars still stand
after the apocalypse,
registry books torn
to become cigarette papers;
the ash of everything
and a child,
painting the phoenix
onto the acid soil,
until the core coils into chainmail.

The echoes of the innocent
make pews into death row,
where the absence of a void
ruminates, glitching, triumphant;
wedding dresses at funerals
brush away the humid dew
of unmown grass,
as the softness of forgetfulness
crowns each grave eternal.

Havisham’s hands are made of soot,
the woman as the pyre,
long-since engulfed
in bitterness;
one lie creating a fragile universe.
Greek chorus repeating
minor rites
until the dead phoenix
dies again,
and only the smoke
of lie-infested letters
rises.

Arch your fingers, clasp your palm,
touch the keys as if pulling
at the heartstrings of a lover;
back in the looming financial crash of 2007
when a family bought a piano
and a new house,
and a young girl ached Chopin.

With your hand out of the window
and the car on the motorway,
talon hands, poised,
feel the air as a shotput;
smooth, round, permanent - oxygen bubbles
puppeteering pale fingertips
until the window goes up
and the radio is heard again.

Speaking three languages,
la mort, la mort, la mort;
D – E – A – D
the keys cannot spell ‘childhood’,
but her fingers reach
more than an octave now
(her thumb still ******).

Chopin welcomes her
to her final decomposition;
her piano, dusty
and blooming with flowers
through each key,
plays discords
that don’t quite make
a funeral march.

I’ll lie to you tomorrow,
but tell you today
that the next 24 hours
will be the start
of something beautiful;

a lie only becomes so
when the truth is impossible –
for all the times I say tomorrow
will be wonderful
there’s a possibility

unfulfilled.

So get a load of this,
me, again,
smiling to show my gums,
me, again,
writing down plans
and burning them,
me, again,
hoping that the ash
will be taken by the wind.

Unfulfilled.

Sunrises are the start and the finish line;
it’s so easy to run,
but it’s harder to stop
before I’m not
unfulfilled.

Here we are again,
the peak of the trough,
and I’m telling everyone
once more
that tomorrow
I will be (un-)

fulfilled.

I trust and believe
that the words of others
are truth and law;
we’ve always been standing
on unequal ground here -
forever on this titanic plane.

The crowd of everyone
and the universal singularity:
me.

You say whatever
and I say okay;
I say I’m drowning
and you say
you’re waiting for something
in the water,
to pop up and tip the scales.

When you knock on my flesh
I tear open a door
for you,
let you worm inside
and deposit your truths
under my skin;
let them grow like parasites
within me,
festering in septicaemia.

With my rotting body
like sea-soaked decks
at the bottom of the ocean,
I’m asking you to validate
the fact that I am becoming the decaying waters
and swallowing the boat,
because you made me
this way - and I?

I am somewhere in the picture, too.

We bought the galaxy
on a mortgage of borrowed time.
Because I wanted
to give you something grand
and you wanted space
and all of the stars.

Who’s in charge of this?
Not us, lying in a single bed
traversing the skies;
you need a bottle-opener
for your wine,
so you destroy a planet
and forge one in a star –
one use only.

I tell you that if we fall
into a black hole,
we’ll see in front of us
everything that will ever happen;
and you tell me you’ll look behind,
instead.

We try and find one,
but our hands come up empty,
and you say you never liked
vacuums, anyway.

I know all this.
I’ve always known all this,
and yet still,
I let you destroy
any home we create;
your hammer on the mantelpiece.

Perhaps spinning through the universe
is worthwhile,
because it means you
have to hold onto something;
finally.