Take four
and make mistakes,
wake in the morning
to check
that your fingers are attached
to the undeniable spot
where your hands end.
Watch the clock
in case it stops;
Dislodge the plaque
behind your gums
and scream in silence
at reflection-you.
Tick tock.
Script the helix
and watch it spiral,
dipped in mothers’ milk,
everyone, gather round
for the epiphany
T-minus twelve days.
Creation calls.
Victor Frankenstein here?
Making something other than history,
constriction in the surgical instruments.
The fate you are going to meet
is going to be so beautiful
for everyone else.
You are going to scream.
You know,
a lot of this is about birth.
Through these broken walls
I hope you realise
that everything here
is supposed to create life.
Even the mistakes.
Someday I’ll write a love letter
to Rosalind Elsie Franklin, like the ones
strewn about my bedroom,
where I tell her about my day
and ask if she would like to stir sugar
into tea with me
and call it a case study into romantics.
Now, pick your metaphor
and run with it, show me
how exactly you’re supposed
to be reading this.
And when you find the answer,
let me know.
Welcome to the beginning.

oh, ****, i'm so full of love it's spilling out of me
like bullet wounds, like i've been court martialed,
like i'm the pinpoint of a broken sheet of glass,
the part from which everything else shatters;
of course i'm the centre of the universe,
who else would be? who else could love this way,
fierce and terrible and hating? who else other than me
could break the universe for another chance at hello
or at two thousand and nineteen?

which isn't to say i'm manic. which isn't to say
that i don't cry in the shower and scream in the car.
i do. but when i do, i'm the main event;
nobody booked tickets to see anybody but me here.
don't kid yourself, world. don't make me laugh.
don't act like everything is okay when i'm breaking the baby-bird bones
of my fingers every time someone else talks.
me, the human stress ball.

me, twenty stories tall and universe-filled with love,
nothing else can even come close. i'm ******* godzilla,
i'm interplanetary, i'm that giant ******* marshmallow man
from ghostbusters getting shot at by the heroes.
maybe there's just too much of me to love the way i need
to be loved; completely, obsessively, like an illness.

oh, god, i want to be loved like i'm sick.
not just another hospital bed but the whole **** ward
all for me. all eyes on me. nobody looking anywhere but me
and oh, please, i'm fine, really,
i don't need all this attention.

like i'm daring the world to divert it away.

a birthday list of gifts:
- a fifth of whiskey
- a gun with one bullet
- the attention that people get from the crowd below before they jump off a building

i don't think i'm asking for too much here.
i feel like i'm one of those unlucky ******* born on christmas day
who get half the presents for twice the occasion.
how cruel must god be to birth me anywhere but eden,
into a world where other people exist,
where we have jobs and say hello to store cashiers and divide up our attention like slices of mandarin.

so where's this revolution i ordered?
where are the people making me important?
i need a cause to lead and a muzzle for my heart,
and i'll burn on and out,
not like a star, but like the end of the ******* universe itself.

and here i am, acting like i matter
when i really only want to matter to you.
i don't care how you want me to revolve
as long as i'm a lone moon. as long as the tides
are all mine; see, it's a lot more complex
than me playing easy villain or anti hero. it's not
been about me this entire time.

but i can't write poems about any other subject.

I wake up and you are still here.
You, of course, being something I can't touch,
a feeling, maybe. A high school crush on forever.
You, of course, are not really a you, but an us,
something I can't touch; a promise
to someone, of something. What it is about
I can't remember. What it is all about I can never
remember.

You are filled with every good day I've ever had
and every good day I never will. Your body bursts
with all the things I didn't get to do
because I was lying in bed, or crying in the shower,
or scared of what strangers would think of me.
When you smile, your teeth bare courage, click-clacking
with the memories of speeding down the highway and turning down
an invitation to a very, very quiet concert.

I can't tear myself into two neat pieces to hate and love you all the same,
I want to pick the meat off the bones and take all the parts I'm grateful for,
leaving you a skeleton carcass that gloats about everything that passed me by.
You, though, are not a meal and I am not a vulture.
I cannot separate the memento from the mori
which, still, leaves me with two choices.
Pretend none of it ever happened,
or accept the whole impossibly beautiful, unimaginably ugly thing.

I want to say please don’t leave,
I still have your coat in my wardrobe
and it looks like you can’t have gone far,
and please don’t leave, I don’t know
where else I’m supposed to stay
when it’s two in the morning
and everything feels like communion,
and please don’t leave, I am having to confront
how selfish I am.

So you’re leaving, and I’m trying to work out
if I should pack my memories into little boxes
and pretend that you’ve died, and you’re leaving
so I’m on the floor in my bedroom thinking
about going somewhere and trying to find Judas
or at least a tree with sturdy branches and the end
of a rainbow with thirty silver coins as compensation.

And now you’ve left, or at least made the decision
to leave, and here I am again trying to wave you off
with images in my mind of the Titanic leaving behind
everyone who couldn’t afford to die so grandly;
you’ve left, and I’m using metaphors to talk about this
because it’s easier than genuflecting and joining
a faceless pew - sorry, don’t think I’m calling myself Jesus
because I’m not. Really, I’m not. But you’ve left,
so don’t I have the right to call myself what I want?

It’s not like you’re here to stop me. There’s that word,
gone,
like it’s final, like you’ve joined the laundry list
of everyone who said they’d be there forever. You’re gone,
and I’m promising myself that I’ll stop being addicted
to people, only cigarettes and cheap wine and the feeling
of missing something when it isn’t quite packed up
into all of the final moving boxes just yet.

The only difference between God and Frankenstein
is the success of what they deemed their magnum opus,
and when it comes down to the end of days,
the Great Judge must turn his gavel inward,
lest he condemn his doppelgänger to an opposite fate.

It is a universal human experience to fail,
even more so to fail at the apex of triumph.
When God made the world, did he imagine
that it would go to waste?
Would it ever have crossed his mind that love is conditional,
at least for the flawed creatures he expected perfection from?

Does this, then, make God human?
Or just a Heavenly Lady of Shalott,
weaving a tapestry of emulation, of the very same
thing he cannot be.
It is considered blasphemous
to entertain the notion that God is inferior,
but is this born of punishment,
or of shame, of trying to save face?

It is stated so many times that the student will surpass the master,
and isn’t that what is happening here?
Perhaps God created trees, but humanity cut them down.
Destruction is just as artful as creation,
if not more so - there’s more finality in it.
It’s possible that God is too scared to ever end a story.

But we - our nation of Frankensteins -
will end everything.
Given the right tools, we’ll end the universe,
far beyond the reaches of this insignificant planet.
We’ll lay waste to God’s pride
and replace it with our own hubris.

We go down on our own sinking ship with smiles;
even if we can escape, we won’t.
We are cruel that way.
We will never accept fatherhood or responsibility,
but spite and death work hand in hand
at the fall of any empire -
what can be done to stop us?
We are fluent in the only language God speaks.

Here, at the crossroads,
faced with the Seraphim,
I cannot make out
what it is supposed to be.
There’s a muted song
speaking of angels,
but I am versed in simple words
and know that the root
is of a snake, of the very same
entity that led Eden to ruin.

Its face is confused,
muddled like it’s being viewed
through a foggy mirror,
wisps of steam and uncertainty
cloud any discernible features
until one of us has to speak.

It has no voice, nor a need
for a voice, so I lend it mine.
I suppose it will answer in riddles,
or smite me on the spot,
but it stares, like nobody
has questioned its existence before.

And the road is still forked,
with no direction upon which
to question the existence
of a Celestial City.
Still, the Seraphim bores
into the marrow of my bones;
I feel it rooting around in there
for anything to judge me by.

It’s uncomfortable, but I am alive.
There are a lot of things in this world
that must have been created
to **** me, like God himself
decided that his finest work
should be one of destruction.

For an infinitesimal moment,
I am illuminated by everything,
and I understand that things only have power
if they believe that they do,
so I press on,
taking the path of the left hand.

Welcome to the council of Jezebel,
here are your sisters, your not-quite nuns
who tell you of false modesty,
and how easy it is to strip yourself to the bone.
You’ll be staying here for a long time
because nobody else wants you -
that’s okay, we’ll teach you how to want you
without manipulation or coercion.

We meet on Saturday nights,
and there’s all the red wine you can drink,
you can gorge yourself on bread
and we’ll call the act of gaining weight beautiful;
we’ll teach you that it’s self-preservation
to deny desirability for fulfilment.

You have your own room in this cloister,
and you’ll never have to sleep on the floor again.
We have a library, and a soft workshop
where you can take apart all of your broken pieces
and learn that you’re not a machine
and can live without them.

If you want to leave, you may,
but nobody has ever done that
so we’re not sure how to deal with regression,
but we do not fear it -
we never fear what we do not understand
because we are feminine beings designed to learn.

The council has no rules - we live free,
no leaves covering our bodies as shameful.
We paint each other using berries and apples,
and at night, when all of the stars have nowhere to guide us,
we sing like free mockingbirds,
revelling in the liberty of what we have to ridicule.