i’m going to have to dress you up for this one, i hope you don’t mind,
it’s just that we’re flitting between identities and trying to change the past.

by change, i mean we’re keeping everything the same,
but switching out her for me,
in the white-washed hallways with that imagery you fear;
a pregnant factory belt birthing electric dreams.

it’s all about what they do to women
and our brains and our autonomy,
it’s selfish, really,
to make this about me sitting alone in my room
but we’re still choking out the space we claim.

if there’s a film camera, there’s a film,
and if there’s an eye, there’s an i.
get those cinematic shots of long hallways where nobody knows what’s next,
and play the nurse, play the exorcist, thrice.

you’ll never know how many years you have after leaving western state,
but i’m hoping for less;
life afterwards is the transitional period between salt and freshwater,
and i need to distance myself.

*oh, how the rooms look so inviting, you’ll be cured here,
how wonderful,
that we have groundbreaking technology to fix your brain
when we tell you it’s broken.
how amazing it must be to be you,
this opportunity
to be chained down by something other than fame,
you look so beautiful!
i have to have you, you look so beautiful!
we’ll keep you here because you look so, so beautiful
when drool leaks from a mute mouth.

there’s a lot of things that people say never existed,
like atlantis, and the love between you and i,
but i am not here to confirm or deny either assumption,
merely to speculate what a world would be like
where you can breathe underwater,
and i can drown comfortably,
and we are together in a place that isn’t real.

before i get ahead of myself,
i’d like to talk about sailors,
whiskey-drunk and singing sea shanties,
and i’d like to talk about pirates,
and the difference between the two.
what i really mean, obviously,
is that i’d like to talk about sirens,
and music, and keaton henson in the middle of the night.

things hit differently when it’s three in the morning;
i’ll be able to shop for groceries and write essays
and exist like a real person until nighttime springs around,
and then i’m lying on my bed catching stars
on the ceiling, hitting myself on the head
to deserve a glimpse of you.
only when everything goes murky,
and i see atlantis in the mist of reality,
am i satisfied.

am i satisfied?
it’s a loaded question, yes,
but we’ve talked about pirates
and we’ve talked about grocery shopping
and i think we’ve exhausted the laundry list of small talk,
so let’s talk about atlantis, instead.
let’s make plans like we used to,
and you can use my spontaneity
to make another girl love you,
and i’ll be alright as long as i have a bank of imagination
and a sea to drown in.

sorry - i don’t mean drowning.
i mean that everywhere is connected in some convoluted way
by oceans, and if i can stretch my heart miles out
then maybe i’ll find something that i can hold onto
when the world is moving too fast for me to grasp onto anything
except the possibility that one day,
i will die, and my body will sink,
and perhaps you’ll sing siren-song at my funeral.

i want to take you to a revolution.
i want to take you to the barricades,
and push a flame against the brown jacket;
as wasps on bicycles whir past our ears,
and we laugh in the sun. we laugh in the sun
and it smiles back.

i want to take you on horseback through the prairie,
cowboys of the untamed west,
and halt as the dust tornadoes around us;
as wasps on horseback threaten to trample us to death,
and we laugh in their faces. we laugh in their faces
and they retreat.

i want to take you to a coffee shop.
a coffee shop, if you get what i mean,
and tell stories of how this is how the world should be;
as wasps in business suits spit on the ground near us,
and we laugh at how it glistens. we laugh at how it glistens
and it sinks into immutable nothingness.

i want to take you to where the universe starts.
i want to point at the atoms that created the big bang,
and see in reality how everything is made of everything;
as wasps are born and collide into evolution,
and we laugh at creation. we laugh at creation
and it burns us into history.

this room is full of clocks,
and i’m learning how to be lonely
against your body.
even if you aren’t here now,
i can imagine that one day,
you were.

how beautiful it would have been
to see you silhouetted against time itself,
the ticking of the universe
in time with your heartbeat
laying waste to cliché
and just loving each other.

i still have not learned how to be lonely,
only how to write about it,
scratching the ink-crust
before it dries.
the walls here are pinned
down in eternity
with drawings and sketches
of how the world looks without me.

but the clocks still carry on,
or most of them, at least.
the grandest of them,
ornate and finite,
have stopped, displaying
meaningless times that i pretend
have significance,
like the most beautiful doomsday
showing when i die.

and when it does happen,
perhaps you will be in this room.
perhaps the ghosts
i am imagining
are merely remnants of a parallel world,
in which you are here,
and in which i do not have to confront
a possibility that loneliness will be forever.

there’s two forests that i’ve committed to memory.

one:
if i want to see the ghost of my seventeen year old self,
i’ll have to buy another bottle of citrus *****
and prepare my soft skin for mosquito bites
as i, drunk and free, roll around in the dirt,
still believing that my life has not yet begun.
i’ll **** behind bushes, with only hand sanitiser and leaves
to cover my body, like a modern-eve.
shivelight will sink onto my body,
my laughter conjuring up ageless forest-spirits.
my friends, also drunk and free, will make promises
that we’ll come back here one day,
that we’ll be like this forever;
we’ll never wrinkle and we’ll never age,
but our lives have not yet begun.

two:
i’ll consider myself wise beyond my years,
bu still young. still having the time
that i beg to be a virtue. still working out
where i want my line breaks to be
if i want to conjure percy shelley’s ghost
and change myself to fit a romantic ideal.
the only system i can break is to skip class
to skip stones into the river in the forest,
thinking of the girl i think i love, the girl i think i hate,
and all of the parts within myself that are mutable
and yet have not changed. i’m seventeen, and i have time.
i have time, and i don’t believe that i will ever run out of it,
even though each hour in this forest is spent
and will not return, i will convince myself
that i am merely solidifying a bank of nostalgia
that will make me smile one day.

i am crying, now.
i will **** myself when i get my first grey hair.

You’re reading this poem
and I’m picking at the hem of my dress
until the circle of fabric
that graced my feet
now sits uncertainly
at my ankles.

You’re not passive,
no longer can you claim actionless;
for every line you read
I’m pulling more
and now my knees are exposed
to the cold scrutiny.

Which line, I wonder,
will you like enough to remember,
and will it be worth anything
when you’re done?
I’m asking you this
not quite rhetorically,
but I don’t think you can see past
the thighs shaking in the winter.

It’s not your fault, of course,
not you, or you,
but you’re still reading,
and I’m still unwinding
the thread,
so let’s make the claim,
you and I,
that we’re both at fault here.

It’ll be too late by the time these words reach you.

There’ll come a point,
where you look away,
and I wonder which part of myself
was too much;
which part of myself
made you turn away,
and which part of myself
needs further work to be presentable
in anything other than excess.

I apologise. I’m rambling, and still pulling at the thread. The idea here is to make this harder to read, because ******* it, I won’t stoop so low as to beg you to stop, but it’s getting colder the more I pull. Soon enough, I’ll be bare in front of you, and what are we to do, then?

What are we ever to do?
It’s alright to stop reading, now,
because there’s no thread left to unravel,
just a pile of loose fabric at my feet, and
you can close the book, now. You can close
it, and I’ll pick up the needle.

She sings to you,
and you know she has returned
with food once more.
She’d **** herself
to throw it back up
into your mouth,
where it will ruminate
in your stomach
until you fly.

It tastes of love and bile,
and you lap it up;
there are things
in this nest
that you cannot name.
You try to
creak out the word
nourishment
but the crackle
in your throat
makes you sing instead.

She wants the best for you.

And off she goes,
her elegance beating
hard against the wind,
wings angelic,
archangel to you
as you watch the vultures
pry their slick bodies
from the shadows.

Take them in,
their greasy rapture
hovering,
and you’ve never understood
circles, but you know now
that you hate them.

It’s a relief when she returns,
exhausted,
stomach full.
There’s more *****,
and you would think,
if you could,
of what it must be like to die
alone.

Then, you fly.
You must.
You do.