Picture it:
one of us is foaming at the mouth.
Who really cares what the other is doing?
Because the spotlight
hangs like a noose against the overdose;
oh, how beautiful and pale white
one of us will soon be.

Flashback, one hour,
laughter plucking the chords
behind our tongues,
spitting slick
bouncing off the walls
of the tour bus.

Forward, one year;
I turn twenty. One day
I will catch up to you.
Minus five days, I sink
and think, god,
did they ever bury you
without the lights on?

I know. I don’t need
it explaining to me
that the inevitable takes us all
one day, that of addiction,
that gaunt-white
Dickensian phantom,
comes to claim back
the transactions.

Only,
it was never like that.
I never knew you,
and there was no danger
of losing my own spotlight
to your noose.

I’ll just go, now,
and pick up a repeat prescription.
I’m talking to nobody.

You said it yourself.

She plays mother,
wraps a scarf around her neck.

Red, once,
a proclamation of this,
of who she is.

In her letters,
she writes of little strong hands
taking her
up and up to the end of the world,
the breathlessness
of love, in which she thought,
and afterwards wrote,
and afterwards danced.

The world takes her
and she paints her neck
with something beautiful;
there’s a lot here
about getting to the roots
of it all.

And from this,
something grows.
Something, now, is cultivated
in the passive tense,
and then poets flock to her,
their little strong hands
grasping against her neck
for a taste of the bruises
and the colours.

But she is a spiral in herself,
a coil waiting to snap,
she is the roots of it all.
And the world wants
what the world wants;
to dig it all up
and plant something acceptable.

Still,
the silkworm woman
will not yield,
caught in the effervescence
of spider webs and champagne
she sings,
she shouts,
opens her mouth,
and silence pours out
of the wound.

What would I promise you?
If only you could take it - god,
the things I would do
if the world could be wrapped up
and handed to me.

And anything you take
might taste dissimilar
to the experiences you pull,
inwards and towards me;
so let’s circle round one more time,
and see if we can find
the spot where this all starts.

Who was it who said
that we are all in the gutter?
I won’t pay reparations
for looking at the stars,
nor will I claim space
against your chest
and pull pills from our hands.

We won’t **** ourselves this New Year.

When I want to wrap up
this narrative, it starts again,
like - ‘hello, who are you?’
or - ‘I remember how you take your coffee,’
or - ‘we never saw that star in the sky last time.’

So there are promises
I have never made,
but they are so dear to me that they beat
hummingbird wings against
the lower lids of my eyes;
my own goals lulling me to sleep,
and it isn’t New Year,
so I do not have a will, or pearls
to clutch.

There’s nothing fresh about making it.
Nothing new about the way
you pluck the mint leaves
and we swill them in our cup of tea,
with the silence,
and the begging,
telling me please, god, please
stop the world.

Well, we know how that one ends,
at least.

I wrote a love letter. This is not it.

But it existed,
you’ll have to take my word for that.
Existed being past tense,
because on the eve of adulthood
I took a glass jar
and my parents’ matches,
and I burned the **** thing to dust.

Which raises a question,
I suppose, of whether
things destroyed become ghosts.
Unnatural death sparking
life again in those same ashes,
a postal service with no return address.

How long before
the subject, unnamed,
would miss what never came?
Or does that even matter?
Yes, I’m asking you
to clarify so far what you think all this means.

Three years later,
I watched as everything imaginable
took shape in the picture of a flame.
Slight movement, repetition, almost,
against a television screen,
but the world became so, so wild,
and then everything was an oil painting
and I was Dorian Gray.

Slow, murmuring, hapless rubble
taking baby steps across my mind,
an experience of imagination
that says, I brought you a love letter,
once, and you crafted that into dust,
so here, take form from ash;
get up and be what you cling to.

I wrote a love letter. This is not it.
But I sent it to fate, to burn.

The fire, artificial, loved me back.

There should be a space
between my head, neck, shoulders,
but I know there isn’t
because I feel every inch of myself
against every other inch of myself
and I can’t move

from here.

I echo,
the voice of myself
barreling against metal walls
to get away from me,
words that defined me
defy me
until I am in the silence of the pipeline
again.

Still moving forward,
my body, parasite,
contorting and coiling
to chase the echo;
my back arched
in desperation to spiral
itself and become
the thing of constriction.

There should be a space
for me to breathe,
but I’ve said this before
and I’m doing this again;
me, in the spiral
in the constriction
in the pipeline of the thing.

I can’t crane my neck
to look back,
see if I’ve left a breadcrumb trail
of the metres I’ve moved
this year;
maybe I’ve passed decades in here,
biting my fingernails
so I never have to see
time move on.

I never have time to move on.

I’m back here again,
the echo behind me now,
coming around, coming around,
biting me
with the idea
that I was here,
and still am.

You wanna talk balance, huh?
You got a lecture to give,
and I’m not allowed to pour a drink
to get me through? Well ****,
if this ain’t ridiculous,
but I’ll listen. Nothing else to do
up here in the snow and the solitude and the shining.

You say things started alright,
and I nod, sip something unreal,
and say yes, my dear,
yes, perhaps I broke his arm
but I’ve vented the pressure
out of the boiler now.
And ain’t it a **** shame
that I don’t talk to Al any more?
‘Cept to sneer about the history
of a place that’s too far away to push
him back to drink.

So sure, tell me I’m unravelling,
and I’ll call you a *****
and you’ll lock yourself up in the room.
Give him the key, I’ll show him
that the **** in 217 is far worse
than a broken arm and a ruined career,
because this will take me away.

Who’s the other one inside me,
worming into a space
that I thought was mine?
Two in one body, a ******’ perfect
discount deal on everything
that can destroy a family;
check one, a son with a broken
arm and a fractured mind,
check two, a ***** for a wife,
and check three, me
the head of it all,
proclamation, divination, damnation
of the foundation of this stutter
looking over, overlooking,
a broken record skipping to the part
where I **** the pressure,
**** the boiler.

I’ll see you in the next one.
Fin.
.

.
Play.

I do not know which iteration of myself
I am pleading with this time,
but let me ask on my knees if I will still be you
when I get to wherever I’m supposed to end up.
When you say ‘try again’ I reset,
slam myself into doors and windows until
the milk of my bones seeps back
into amniotic fluid, and then I am here again.

I am here again, and now
I have new mistakes to make.

Pause. Confusion. Breathe. Play.

There’s a body in the glass,
fragments plucking themselves
through parallelities;
there’s something beautiful
next to something that stings,
and they pool together
like watercolours against a sky
where you can pluck your finger
from the air and lay claim to the spot
where you think the end might be.

If you want the end to be yours,
then take it. Tell me
how I should be going about this,
and if you can watch as I
ruin everything again, let yourself
become dust in the air
and surround me with the control
that I do not have.

I’m not in control.
I’m never in control.
And there’s something absurd in the air
that pushes the day to the horizon
again.

It’s up to you now.

Pause. Rewind.
.