First-class lipstick,
like satin,
gently marking into history
sign-offs and signatures,
transcending boundaries
between land and ocean.

Nothing unwritten;
everything perfected
in the sweet subtlety
of marking names
and millions of ways
to say the same sentiment,
sealed up below the deck.

Traversing the sea,
unread letters wait
in the salt and the sediment,
that will soon wash over them;
the timelessness of tragedy –
of waters that lap
over delicate bodies on beachline shores.

These same elements,
clinging to life
within seawater-stained envelopes
find themselves
just a little too much,
almost a second out of time
with the world outside the ocean.

Now, timelessness has moved on,
and many ships have fallen since,
but there remains
a pocket of air,
huddled in the North Atlantic,
where love letters still muse
with writers’ delicate bones
and the sweet serenade of saltwater.

I didn’t get the memo
to evolve -
stop sticking my hands
into the fresh-fire,
as if some part
of my visceral mania
wants to ****** my knuckles
with the ashes of Prometheus.

Every day that I don’t crash my car
is a white-hot remnant
of the suffocation of boredom,
like my life is on pause
until I’m nose down in a gutter
or in a line that I keep trying to cross.

There’s evaporated acid rain
condensing within every hangover,
each time the sun
rises; I rip down my fingernails
climbing to reach it,
gasping down
at the pulsating impulse
to make something terrifying
out of paper maché
and broken bottles
and bruised ego.

In every grave, there’s an I,
subtly watching
for the apotheosis;
a moment of sickly-yellow violence
igniting once more
any excuse for a fight
for fame,
for a feeling.

With every resistance,
remember –
how everything was choked
back into your mouth
when you were a baby bird
and the barricades
were not yet burned.

When you,
with aching gaze
watch the Joan of Arc torches
purge their way
up the winding acres
of stolen wood;
call yourself to Dunsinane
and wait there.

***** up your own feathers
and try to fly –
strip yourself of ash;
pretend that your fragility
is a stepping stone
to becoming a phoenix.

Inhale smoke
and watch the revolution
burn beneath your broken body,
your flightless bones
crushed to mothers’ milk,
countless choking coughs
coming up; down again.

Sing;
drown out the inevitable,
and choke;
with beautiful sounds
of death drawing acid
up your cartilage;
revolutionaries flee
the barricades, the fire,
whilst you beg
for what you have lost
to be choked back into you again.

One:

This is
the white-night
burst
of seven billion
voices singing
requiem dies irae
as mountains fall -
desperately breaking
independently
from the shards.

This is
the collective collapse
of a season of stars -
of Van Goghs and Mozarts,
and all those dug up
graves; bodies
loose in the wind.

This is
lovers’ last request;
worldwide relief
underneath burning wood,
silk moon,
translucent veil.

This is
the eulogy
of the earth.

This;
unwritten.

——————————————————————————————

Two:

H­ere,
the silent universe.

Here,
intergalactic war
halted, planets
bowed with rings
draped in black.

Here,
mourning the loss
of a child
who had merely
taken one shaky
footstep
into the dark.

Here,
solemn species
contemplate
the finality of this;
somewhere
an old-earth radio
creaks its way
into playing
Electric Light Orchestra
and the older ones sigh
remembering the
burned out
blue sky.

Here,
entire constellations
flick themselves
out of place;
an infinitesimal
blip
marked down
in universal history -
and songs echo
in a vacuum
for a brief eternity;
the collective memory
that once
just once
the earth had existed.

Do we want to make it out of this alive?
Was that ever the plan? –
When we called each other beautiful,
and our friends laughed
because we were perfect for each other
but I wasn’t made for you.

Do you want me to live through this?
Even after all of this,
being read, being spoken,
I do not understand the role I seem to play.

Can you shed some light on my purpose?
Right now, it seems,
I’m only good to tell you stories
from another girl
who doesn’t hold a knife to her hair
in the drunken night-time.

Is there still something to cut off?
Look at me, asking you,
shouting up to the pedestal
I built, myself.
What would you like for breakfast?
What sacrifice would you like today?
Don’t say ‘nothing’;
it seems I am only good
to cook you blood-pudding
and pretend that I am talking
to someone singular.

Will you take another hit? –
Or is this one all mine?
It’s another Tuesday afternoon,
again, and we’re in the
limelight milk-light
and you’re somehow every girl
I’ve ever loved
but I don’t want to kiss you
because you, and she, and I
are not as real as the stories
I tell.

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.

Copy yourself,
make something other
a binary you,
in a world
of starships and code
and the fact that death
doesn’t really mean anything here.

Right here,
we don’t need
oxygen or food,
in this world
of falsity and fantasy
and the sweetness of hallucination
that aches behind your body.
Stand still,
headset firmly on
and breaths calm,
a new world awaits your better self
where you forget the depersonalisation
of still always being human.

Copy that,
you’re the captain
of false starships,
hurtling through uncertainty
with virtual reality comforting
you when you realise that
you’ll never be like this.

Another you,
version fifty-three
in a chain,
never changing yourself
or becoming something better
only sticking in mistakes
and pretending like it’s improvement.

Copy yourself,
make another other
for another self,
forget your body
and transmit human signals
to other fake-people
who tell themselves aching stories

of a reality
that we daren’t change.

Clenching my lies within my fists
I stand prominent,
forcing the pressure of weightlessness
onto them until they crack;
opening up like wounds,
drenching the tips of my fingers
in venom and lava.

Their acid burn
seeps into the cuts in my skin
from times I have fought this before;
an unyielding inevitability
soaks the marrow of my bones
as I stand – defender and defenceless,
my fists still closed, un-bloomed.

Primed to punch, my stance is unyielding,
as if my body and throat are at war
between the truth and the other;
head lolling in despair
at who I have become
and what I am holding.

The way out is the way in
and I’m looping,
rolling down a hill in a memorial summer,
catching myself at the bottom
and finding it to be the ash-sky;
continually Catherine-wheeling
through remnants of other iterations
of this inevitability.
We always end up here.
We always end up
here.

Soft skin, marred,
jagged cheekbones
cutting into blank white;
suffocating plastic sweats
against the mouth of the thing.

A moth-swarm of faces,
of sickly hospital white
plastic; mouths gasping
for air and everyone drinking spirits
like the world is about to end.

The façade of a masquerade,
pearl whites with jagged oysters
creaking underneath, all botox
and sloppily revisited youth;
death is passed as a disease.

One within, too prideful
for a mask, yet pale faced
enough to spend the night
in the quagmire and relive
the quicksand underfoot forever.

Hard, wrinkled women
ruining themselves,
asphyxiating slowly in the crushing
pressure of plastic on sweat on skin
right down to the bone.

Still, the white-wind, bare, ghost
lingers in the after-party,
picking up the discarded masks
with smooth, youthful fingers;
resignedly exhaling down into sinking earth.

Take off your hands
like a shop window mannequin
and give them to me;
let me imagine that it’s you
sleeping on the other side of the bed.

Your hands
and mine.

Let me let you
feel the bridge of my nose
and run your hands over
the scar on my elbow,
the mole on my chin
to make it yours
even when I’m holding you holding me.

Tell me it’ll always be this easy;
this gentle;
this much led by the me
that’s leading you.
Let me use your hands
to call you
so I can use your *******
to tell you that I hate it
when you don’t answer.

Make your hands puppet master
and let me hold them;
as they contort me
into however I think they think
they want me to be.

And then let them
fall into bed with me
as I sleep,
holding your cold hand
in a double bed;
painfully aware
of the blistering, dry
burn of always being
alone.

i can live without my feet. i can live
without anything that makes me carry on;
carry this pretty sweat of life on my hunched back.
every day i wake up and there's a new ache,
a new heartbreak to write about in the diary i burned when i was 17;

when i was sweeter and lighter and thought that drowning would be a nice way to die.

i listen to music to fall asleep,
until i get to the point between waking and the good stuff
when i slam my laptop shut and my brain says
right, now it's time to imagine you're dying, and everyone cares,
everyone is at your funeral wishing they were nicer to you when you cried over chicken breast and were in a whirlwind relationship with iced coffee.

sometimes i guess it's easier to pour the leftover ice from last night's gin and tonics into coffee. sometimes it's best to leave poems unfinished.

i don't think i'm getting better
but i'm drinking oat milk again.
it's the stuff my parents buy,
rich and creamy, and it doesn't
have the aftertaste of thick curdle.
and, i mean, i'm still listening to mitski,
but it's strawberry blond, not nobody,
which is equally sad when you read into it –
except i'm trying not to read into things any more.

i got a degree in reading into things
from the same university wherein i walked
the unfamiliar city streets at three in the morning,
looking for a suitable canal to drown myself in.
it was all dropping rocks to test the depth,
hands stuffed in my bright yellow raincoat pockets,
van gogh quotes and 11am seminars
and "i don't really want to die thirsty, maybe i should just

go home, you know?"

but i did that. three years of it, and i went home
to a not-quite home. that's what my parents say.
"what time are you home?" and "aren't you glad to be home?"
except for me, home isn't a four bedroom in warrington.
it's not even a seven bedroom (or, as we had it, six-bedroom-and-one-unusued-gym-room) in lancaster. it's...

well, that's the thing, isn't it?
what is home?
it's certainly not a dairy substitute.
although, i suppose, i'd rather drown in swirls of oat
than swirls of lactose. my parents say i've always been quirky like that.

me. quirky little girl from warrington.

i go through the hollow days
until the first drop of alcohol hits my tongue;
and then, the choice. the concerned mother,
the train-track rumbling stomach, the
"you can't drink any more unless you eat something."

i want to say it's my life. i want to say
that drinking on an empty stomach is far
more cost effective and that i'm here to go
the distance. it's enough for the first
few hours to laugh it off, until the house is closed
up and the oven is on, on, on.

really, it's not my fault. my dad's a chef. i'm human
and i know i'll die if i chastity-lock my lips forever, it's just...
well, there's something in it. there's something
perfect about "no thanks, i'm not hungry,"
like the smiling hollow is earthquake-rumbling:
"yes, yes, yes, one day you will die small."

my fingers stutter shattered sentences
when i'm like this. when i'm like this,
i'm shrink plastic and the world is an oven; or –
when i'm like this, i'm every unsatisfying
leaf that never crunched underfoot. i'm the spitting
shivering underdog who never made it out of the gate.
i'm pluto between the years 2006 and the end of the world.
when i'm like this, the world is like that,
meaning that the world is my childhood. the world
is the bloated feeling of a stomach full of lukewarm tap water.
the world is a surprise party wrapped up straitjacket-tight
and just a day too early.

when i'm like this, i'm always stepping on the cracks
in the pavement. the cracks, the world says, will open up
and swallow me into the belly of the beast.

it's 8pm on a tuesday night and i'm drinking beer in the shower.
it's an art form, holding the thin neck like a perfect knot,
my fingers rough rope against the grit of the glass. i think of sea salt
and fishermen, and weaving upon weaving. my hands are not rough
in the way that fishermen's hands are rough. i bite the skin
around my nails and on the top of my fingers, and the water seeps
into the gaps and they bulge, like some percy shelley-esque bloated,
dead body.

it's just one beer, i tell myself, and i'm not drinking it to get drunk. no,
if i wanted to get drunk i'd have brought the bourbon or the wine
in here with me. i think my mouth just wants something to do other than beg. i kiss the lip and wonder how hard i would have to bite to see what shatters first; red blood on brown glass on rainwater-not-rainwater.

it's not just me in the house. i cried loudly before i slept last night, at five or six or whatever in the morning, and now the house has been christened with a ghost-echo that will die longer than it lived, far longer than my short, one year tenure in these rented student walls.
the others (who, might i say, are handling this whole mess of being alive with far more optimism and birthday cake than i am) are in the kitchen,
doing something with the tap. turning it off and on.
i don't think they mean for the shower to hum alongside,
my passivity the canvas for another action, and it's not like –
it's not like i mind. no, it's not like i mind.
the water is powerful, hot, then cool and slow, like rain instead of thunder, but my back is just my back.
which is to say, of course, that i'm not in here to get clean.
if i was in here to get clean, i wouldn't have brought that beer in with me.

but i digress:
i've been staring at the shampoo bottle for a while now
and my eyes have unfocused. of course. i might be the wrong way round
but i'm not stupid enough to wear my glasses in the shower.
the words are fuzzy but i can tell it's the special shampoo i bought
for when i bleached my hair in this same, small bathroom (when i tried to reclaim
a story that i'm never going to finish writing. about fishermen and people with teal hair and a hero who gets a hero's ending).
my hair is dark brown now, all over.
brown hair on brown glass on murky brown beer.
i'm supposed to think of a statement to leave you thinking about this,
about me,
but i haven't finished writing it yet.

putting an ending on something in progress feels too much like suicide.

The hands that are locked inside my body
pull at my ribcage. We'll make you an angel,
they say, but that means
tearing my flesh apart. I beg them –
please, take my brain,
pull it and mould it and set it on fire.
The brain is too precious, they spit,
and I want to die. I want to die
to make myself something else. Something...
palatable. Something that I can chew
and swallow all at once.

Instead, they bite. God, they sink
their seraphim teeth into the flesh
that I call myself. And they digest.

And what of the brain?
Alive, immobile, it waits.
In pain, it waits. Screams.
Begs for release.
But these angels are not from Heaven,
nor do they caress broken bones
once they have devoured.