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.

Four clocks on the wall,
telling me that I’m running out of time.
There’s only me in this ghost-town,
keeper of the hands,
and I have to reset each clock
before it develops a mind
of its own.

The problem arises in that I
am flawed, and slow,
and by the time I have reset
the fourth clock,
the first is taunting me
to run back and start it all over
again.

And what’s worse?
I can no longer tell
whether I have been at this
for hours, days, months, even.
My Hell-shackles are the very thing
I am trying to push back.
I could call it a prison
of my own creation,
but I wouldn’t want to plagiarise God.

I’m having a lot of waking dreams,
like I’m hypnotised. Sometimes,
I hear voices telling me what to do
in catastrophising extremes. Set
back the clocks, or you will die one day.
Set back the clocks. Set back the clocks.
Set back the c—

Some bodies are made of worms,
soft, malleable, wet to the touch
with tears and a thin layer of grime,
built up over years of creaky limbs
oiled with their own disuse.

Some bodies are made of wasps,
and they are violent. The buzz
rings in the ears and they are the type
to throw drunken punches. Every
second is all that is.

Some bodies are made of earth,
in that they sustain others
and drain themselves. Global
warming will **** them off, but
for now, they shine.

Some bodies are made of other bodies,
like Frankenstein, like corpses
that aren’t quite done yet
with the worms and the wasps
and the ground that they clawed out of.

The body peels itself
away from the floorboards,
sweat, sticky and slick,
pops like a gunshot
as the skin pulls loose.

Shoulder blades pulsate
as movement returns
once more. “It’s been
a hell of a night,”
the heavy arms creak.

Even in the dark of the room,
the body can sense morning;
the dew on the legs, the cool
floorboards are warming
with the dawn.

There’s something here
about a beginning.
The body
pulls at the skin
and it is still attached —

Meaning, of course,
that the body is a body
once more. Meaning,
of course, that the beginning
has already begun.

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.

The shower floor
is both blistering
and icy. The water
that has pooled
under my thighs
is colder
than the heat
pounding through
the flesh of my back,
right to my spine.

I like existing
between things.
I like loving so hard
that it hurts,
and hating so violently
that I burn
like the shower-fire.

I do not know
how to do things
in anything other
than extremes.
I’m searching for
an ending
in the middle
of a battlefield,
ripping red raw
welts on my hands.

There’s a reason
behind all of this,
but if I ever find it out,
I am sure that I will die
on impact. Like a rocket
falling from the Heavens.
Like we made Man
into God, and were cast
down in Challenger fire.

Herod’s fingers taste
of earthquakes, of disaster,
of the spit of the woman
he liked before me.

Potiphar’s coins ring
in my ears, on my fingers,
a pile of gold to drown
my splayed body in.

The two men play poker,
and I am the bargaining chip,
for their straight flush,
ashamed and disinterested.

Herod will not fold,
his pride venomous
against his meaty chest,
all wiry hairs and “I dare you”s.

Potiphar raises the stakes
with a flash of gold tooth,
and drags his finger along his neck,
slender and elongated.

The guillotine already feels familiar,
as the rules are plucked
like fresh grapes
or the only rotten part of the fig.

Herod beckons me forth
to look at his cards;
“yes,” I say,
“you are ruthless.”

Potiphar snatches me, now,
and I see his hand,
“yes,” I say,
“you are wise.”

Both men want something.
A prize to rip open
and sink their gluttonous lips into
like they do not know Daniel.

I want out of this room,
the sticky heat of summer
is beginning to upset
the restless lions.

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.

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.

A virus is like a secret,
once it’s out, it’s out.
Like, hey, don’t tell anyone,
but I’m gay, and I have blood
in my lungs. I’m trying to choke
the gay out of myself
before anyone else can. You
see, it’s all about control:
needing it, and taking it,
and the in-between state
of having complete control
and spiralling out of it at the same time.

So if I want to find a vaccine
for all the bad thoughts I’m having
about myself, isn’t that just another
way of saying that I’m trying to make myself
immune to hatred from outside?
If it originates in the lungs,
in the mind, in the sickly body,
then it’s somehow more authentic.

And maybe I can deal with it
a little better. Only a little,
because I’m still one-hand-pinned
against the wall, choking myself
to the point that I can’t form words,
can’t say the things I’m desperately
trying to adjust to.

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.

The first plague that sunk into us told us how to see red,
the anger, either alien or overfamiliar, turned inwards
into our stomachs, acidic and bubbling until we choked
on the waters, and still we begged the Nile
for relief, ******* salt from our tears.

And then there was discomfort, slipping into our beds at night.
The women, familiar with the dissimilarity of abject slime
merely sighed in the expectation of their husbands,
but the sensation screamed of newness to the men, and they ran.

When lice came, we scratched ourselves raw and there was redness again,
until the streets were serenaded by shrieks, and long fingernails became fitting
for women who sewed new clothes when the others ripped theirs apart.

The wild animals were like old friends who tore apart already broken bodies;
this was the time that the women sang each other to sleep,
all we could do was offer meek comfort to each other,
telling stories of how this would never have happened
were it not for the pride that never touched us.

Women worried when pestilence came, unforgiving and without discrimination
to our livestock; without food, we starved ourselves intentionally,
hoping with fragile limbs that there would never be enough meat
on our bodies to substitute for sustenance.

Pained enough, we thought we were used to it when our bodies turned against us,
without anger this time, only vile sores that burst in the dead of night;
we soothed each other’s wounds, our hands familiar with battle scars
and hoped that it would be enough.

The end of days could not come faster than when the fire rained down on us.
Some brave women, tired of being sacrifices, ran towards the flames,
either weary and half-finished already, or aching to find a burning bush
through which salvation may lie for those who did no wrong.

An attack on our senses droned into nothingness as locusts fell,
their bodies used to punish us, a concept of which we wept for,
we knew intimately, and sobbed not for the chess board
but for the pawns who must always fall first.

It was strange, how much darkness felt like reprieve,
in those three liminal days where our songs were unburdened
and rang free across the devastated plains;
oh, those days we sang so loudly that it was almost over.
They were almost free, and we were almost able to go back
to how we were different before.

But tragedy seeps slowly in the night on the burning wings of angels,
and our firstborns were stolen.
I, still young, did not bear the grief of mothers, but I was the third child.
It’s harder to be going than to be gone.

Samson rips me limb from limb,
and I thank him, because God
gave him this power, and who am I,
lowly and lonely, to question
what flowing hair sinks beneath my body
as I commit myself to some kind of ending?

Then I am watching from below,
eternally reaching upwards, asking
for some recognition from either side;
which will claim me for their own?
Purgatory is a too-small coffin
for the only one who is neither good nor bad.

Samson steps over my body,
and I shudder in ecstasy,
perhaps to love a man was to destroy myself,
but false pleasure speaks testament
to how simple it would be
to pluck the hairs from his head.

Above me, Heaven song;
below me, Hell song.
Neither God nor the Devil will admit
that they are brothers singing in harmony,
and nobody will believe
the only person who can hear it.

And then I am in love with Delilah,
and how she did what no man could;
Samson was not flayed in battle,
but taken down whilst he slept
in his conceited neglect of the fact
that it was a woman who led Adam to bite.

Still, I am dead,
and Samson is not joining me.
His soul has been claimed by side unknown,
and here I lie,
coffin-sick and wondering
which direction I should wave my white flag.

Ambrosia makes you a man, Apollo,
And to me, bring forth the ancient sunrise;
Go! You go, and ever shall I follow,
One man in your eternal light disguised.
Too short a time I have borrowed for you,
And from you, forever a single breath;
Your honey-thick glory mine to pursue,
Chased and captured, birthright to timely death.
Those Biblical tales I shall now forsake,
For no God but yourself shall e’er be prayed;
Angels—I shun them; their eyes I unmake,
I look unto you, and be not afraid.
Do not grieve for me: I will not be gone,
My Apollo, I will be in the dawn.

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.

I think of you, and I think of sirens
But not of shipwrecks. Of lighthouses
But not of dark shores. Sometimes, I
Think so much that it hurts,
And then I stop thinking.

I think of you, and I think of sunshine
But not of night. Of the moon
But not of the tides. Sometimes, I
Want to sit by the ocean
And swallow it whole,
And then I stop crying.

I think of you. I think of you.
I see the world,
And I think of you.

We were dying of thirst,
clamouring amongst each other
to lick the spit of women
like mothers’ milk,
we cried out, begging
for resolution,
for water in the drought.

Our lives were shattered,
children screaming
for the since-dried milk
of nourishment,
women sobbing upon
small corpses.

God, we cried.

And then you came,
a gift amongst the flint;
we had long since found fire
but you taught us
how to put it out.

It ached in the milk-light
of our bones,
a flowing stream
and tablets carved
of testaments,
of commandments
that spoke
of how we were destroying
the earth,
how repentance
is simply not enough.

And god, we cried,
we cleansed our sins,
and we cried
for water,
and you brought it to us.

Legs spread,
Mother Mary holding
women close,
the only sacrament
worthy of sacrifice.
Men falling in useless battles,
and women bringing water
to the dead.

We found a stream.
We drank.

Mother Mary sunk wide,
and god, we drank.

i don’t think i love you any more,
whoever you are;
i guess i talked myself out of it
like i talk myself out of impulse purchases
or loving myself fiercely.
the point is, i don’t want to go anywhere
with you, only home, alone,
even if this isn’t finished yet.

i think there’s some finality
that neither of us will reach here,
but what you’re reading is the beginning
of the end.
i’ve fallen out of love with you,
yes, i don’t think it any more,
i know it.
this is so nearly over,
the page is breathing a sigh of relief.

so i’m going home.
i’m going somewhere safe,
and the door will be locked behind me.
the bottles of wine
in the bag against my door
will windchime-beckon my arrival,
loving me far more honestly
than anything you’ve given to me
or i’ve taken from you in here.

i’m bursting the bubble that i created,
and you’re going to hate it,
but i don’t love you any more,
so i don’t think i need to destroy
what i need just to see you smile, now.
here’s me, picking up the knife,
and you’re not begging me to do anything,
you’re just staring
at whatever i’m saying
like these words are somehow real
and not present in the moment.

it’s been fun. just fun,
but i’m going home now.
whichever sense of place
i’ve tried to lay claim to
will forever be lost on a plane ticket
or a scrapbook that i won’t make,
because i’m going home, now.

i’m nearly there.

The thing with begging to be loved
is that there’s more love in the begging
than there is in the aftermath.
There’s more to be loved in a pathetic way
than ever in something genuine.

But we still do it. Admit it,
you’re not the exception. We drag
our hands across our bodies
and pluck them into something acceptable;
there comes a point where it’s not love,
but violence. But acknowledgement —

and **** it if they don’t feel the same.
We are all crying the way children cry
for attention. If I scrape my knee
on the thick tarmac, will I still have to walk
home alone?

The birds sing for food early in the morning.
If I were a mother, I would never
make my child beg for *****. If I were a mother,
I would rip myself apart six months in
to see if I was cooking up something that looked
like me.

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.

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.

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.

An Easter banquet.
A Good Friday fast
that ends in gorging.
A slaughtered lamb
with hands and flesh
on the table.
Blood on the napkins
and silence.
Emptiness at the head
of the table,
save for forks scraping
cheap porcelain.
We save the good plates
for good days,
so naturally,
they’ve never been used.
I wonder
how it feels
to have never
held food in my palms.
Give me five thousand
and I will feed them all.
Give me an
all-you-can-eat buffet
and I’ll turn it down.
I am faceless, but
not in this crowd.
A crowd, yes,
but not this one.
I’m the B-lister of the Bible.

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.

They were making Jesus into a marionette.
That’s why they nailed through his hands,
because the hands are attached to the arms,
and the arms the shoulders, and from there
you can pretty much control the whole body.

It’s too easy, far too on the nose
to pretend that God is the puppet master,
and I don’t want to give any credit
to the executioners. So, let’s say
that Jesus is both puppet and puppeteer:

right. You following me?
Hands are being manipulated by hands,
and I’m trying to get at something
beyond a religion I don’t believe in any more.
The ****** lamb is in his ****** chamber
and there’s something controlling all of this.

Unreality is the only thing
that can, for sure, be real. If we’re all
in a collective simulation,
made up amoebas floating around
in some brain hooked up to wires,
then why did we invent God?

don’t worry, i realised it for both of us;
how immaterial we are in terms of this
high rise plumed against the sky.

how there may be a man -
any man -
playing guitar below, but he
is playing for nobody, not even us.
we’re just singing along.

and the clouds whisper down
that it might rain later,
but i’ll still take your hand
on the railing,
illuminated with neon,
half-life filtered
through ***** glasses and ecstasy,
and we’ll talk about
getting back to the present.

because now, it’s nighttime,
and now, you look
like me in this light
and now, the immaterial
is taking off into
what we could have been,
had we only stayed in this spot
thirty years ago.

but it doesn’t matter
who we are.
we are here.
scratch it into the railing
with the key
i gave you
yesterday.

these indistinguishable streets,
walkways, crowning themselves
into a sense of uniqueness;
not quite defined
but solitary, and ripe
in their loneliness.

crooked bricks,
vying for sunlight;
the endless yearning
to be free. streets
slanted, disjointed,
quite confined in song
and history.

something shared
between the potholes,
passed forth
and forth again,
like garden twine
binding something
against something else.

it’s vague;
by nature, perception
is subjective
and you may take from this
what you desire.

if you listen,
you can hear the ticking
of everything
that has passed this by,
alleyways branching
into each other, snaking
circles around the easy way out.

so let’s work out
a sense of place.
something that you
can lay claim to, as understanding
l’histoire de la vie
from all of this.

see it yet?

in my daydreams, there are two beautiful things;
you, and the possibility of not being alone.
everything else is pretty, but cannot compare
to these two non-facts.

even when the sky chooses colours
that have never been combined before,
and clouds wisp across the sky like a marching band,
i only want to look at you, and be together.

even when the sun peaks over the horizon,
crowning another day in such bright gold
that i have to squint, i can stare wide-eyed
at you, and i am no longer lonely.

even as the breeze seeps into the grass,
blowing kisses to lovers and losers alike,
gentle and soft and unknowing of hurricanes,
i have you, and i am not isolated.

even as midday blazes with all the force
of commanding attention, and birds scream-sing
songs that i’ve never heard before, i will listen
but not look, because i am with you.

even when eternity stretches out across the daydream,
calling up wonders of possibility,
saying that anything can be real if i can imagine it,
i only imagine you, and a world that loves me back.

even when the day fades into brilliant night,
and stars ***** themselves into a pinboard-reality,
i cannot bring myself to count constellations,
because you are there, and brighter than them all.

it sounds romantic. it sounds like i am in love,
but really, i’m just terrified that if i look away for a moment,
you’ll be gone, and i’ll have to find a mirror to shatter
so that i cannot confront what i am missing.

even when the dream fades,
and the world sets in, all train tracks and buildings
that i can jump off, i don’t,
because i have my mind, and i haven’t lost it yet.

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.

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.

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.

The foot of my bed
(where the duvet, entangled in dreams,
holds me hostage between the legs)
is slick with something cool.
Something cold — stark contrast
to the sweat winking amongst leg hair —
caresses, allows airflow to de-stagnate
the locked-in night breath.

She is all eyes and hands
in all the wrong places, long fingers
separating human from other.
Her voice coos like honey
and I am bound to mattress, shivering.

If this were a hotel, there may be a Bible
in the bedside drawer, but I would rather clutch
something else. This is home,
and with no choice but to welcome the night,
I release the dust from under my fingernails,
blessed spit holy between milk thigh.

I have heard tales of angels,
women of fire whose voices, un-silenced,
make ears bleed. I am no stranger
to blood.

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.

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.

I love this!
Being a sacrifice,
Father, I love this!
Oh, thank you,
thank you so much
for not asking me
if it’s alright to cut open my flesh,
thank you, thank you!
It’s such a wonderful feeling,
ah! It hurts -
thank you!
God is so merciful,
perhaps I’ll get into Heaven
with this offering -
what do you mean it’s all for you?
What do you mean I’m just a commodity?
What do you mean my flesh is yours to give?

Father!
I do not want this anymore,
I do not want to be a sacrifice
if I will not reap the rewards -
god, it burns!
The knife cuts me open
like Sunday dinner;
how is this not mine?
How is my flesh not mine to own?

Father, please!
I am begging you,
ease up, stop cutting,
I’ll repent, I’ll be yours,
I’ll open myself up
if it’s what you command,
but do not let my flesh
be given to someone else.

No! Nobody will know sacrifice
like I know it,
intimately and forever -
I am not yours!
My blood is not yours to give,
but you tie me down,
and god!
God!
It hurts -
father, Father, please, it hurts.

Shuffle towards the marrow of my bones, Abraham.
Know my eyes when you burn into them.
I am your sacrifice,
but never willingly.

I wear a mask in bed
to shield my eyes from the dark.
The separation of dark, really;
the two darks — the within and the without;
me, my eyes, locked into a body,
and even if I open them, I will be blind.

Outside the thin film of cotton,
the second darkness ticks onwards.
There is movement in this dark,
there is dancing,
there is a moon tracking snail-slick
across the sky, stars in its wake.
I could not sleep in this darkness
if I wanted to. I would feel motion sick
and my heavy legs would carry me
from sight to sight, dark to dark
until I became part of it.
It’s something I want to be part of, one day,
whether I’m six feet under or scattered
along the Earth, I want to no longer be scared
of the darkness that moves.

Eventually,
you have to wake up.
You’re going to have to sit
back in your chair and drink whatever
stale coffee you’ve been nursing for an hour.

Perhaps all of this has been a dream, but not a good
enough one to read back and check whether it’s worth actualising
into something other than an insomniac cry for help. I would dial it back
if I could, make it easier to digest behind the eyes, but then I’d be
running the risk of saying things that I don’t mean. Maybe
there’s a little bit of truth to that. Maybe we’re all unable
to sleep in past noon. If you want to call me a liar,
I’ll take it. I’ll take anything at this point.

Especially if it’s over the counter.
You ever try that? For
insomnia, I mean.

They give you pills now, when you tell them you can’t sleep.
They knock you out real good and you wake up foggy,
the throes of a dream already slipping away like crushed glass.
You know, I heard of a guy once who got knocked out
and lived a whole other life, with a made up house and a made up
wife and a made up storyline, and then he woke up on the ground
and he was somebody else. I mean, he was himself, of course,
but he’d dreamed himself into another life, so the real one was more unreal
than the thing in his brain. Interesting, isn’t it? How time is fragile enough
that you can live fifty years in the second it takes to recover from a hard punch.
Do you see what I’m getting at, now? Pinch me. I need to know if I’m real.

Darling, please tell me which head you want on a platter,
and I’ll bring it to you. Don’t love him, please,
don’t love him, love me instead,
yes, I’ll decapitate myself if it means you’ll kiss my dead lips,
and please, love me until I die,
it’ll be an honour for a mouth like yours to mourn for me,
but please, don’t mourn for me.

I’m nothing in terms of you,
but I want you to remember me,
if only through the candles in the church,
from which my face burns in selfish wonder,
asking you if you’ve read my autobiography yet, and what you
thought of what I had to say,
don’t mourn for me.

Silver feels so sweet against my flesh,
so cool, like the pools of water
in which I sink myself,
waiting to drown like it’s the only thing that matters,
like all I can do is **** saltwater violently,
and I love you violently,
please, I love you,
but don’t mourn for me.

I wonder how you’ll cut my head off,
whether you’ll use a knife or a sword,
or the switchblade with dried blood that I showed you;
yes, I’m laying claim to this,
and yes, I’m begging you to use my own weapons against me,
but I’ll die anyway.
Let me have this,
but please,
don’t mourn for me.

Can I beg?
Can I ask you to **** me,
so that I can pretend it was my choice
to be lying here,
pale and emaciated,
kissing the knife against my neck,
calling you vampire,
calling you mine,
calling myself baptist, but lover,
don’t mourn for me.

I’ll call cool waters home,
I’ll think of the ocean,
and I’ll think of you,
and I’ll craft a manger from all of this dust,
because that’s all I’ll ever become
as long as you, Salome,
never mourn for me.

It’s time to go to sleep.
It’s time to put the weary
mind to rest again,
and hope that it will wake
once more to a fresh day.

Imagine dew drops.
Imagine morning blessing
afternoon, and imagine
seeing it as if for the first time.

If this is what gets you through,
then that’s alright. We’re all
just meandering our way
through life. It’s a pandemic
of words, of empty promises,
of sunrises that are more boring
than spectacular.

There’s actually nothing
to be said for living,
any more. It’s not grand,
or brave, or admirable.
It isn’t even the only option,
nor is it expected.
But we — I — still need permission
to die.

If I’m ending this here,
then it’s up to you. The reader.
If you would like to close this all down,
I won’t hold it against you.
Free me from these pages,
and I’d be grateful if I was able.
And if you want to forget me,
to make me die twice,
then make it quick, and don’t hesitate.

The woman’s width is claimed by God;
milk and blood mingle into love,
and the King of Kings is crowned in the birth canal.
Invite all the strangers to gawk,
their gifts garish and presented with condition -
she will, one day, be an afterthought,
not a second, but a fourth.

She will gather with those who will one day mourn
alongside her, her hands fresh salt
and the rest of her the wound.
It was never a choice that came willingly,
but from Ophelia to Monroe
she will be remembered how men wish her to be.

When her face appears in streams and mirrors,
know that only the reflection has power -
she has plucked the cord from between the mountains
and now her womb will glisten,
slick with sweat and blessèd water,
in the fifth layer of the eternal Heaven she was promised.

The woman, with her limbs and eyes and cracking bones,
is supposed to rise, but the writing stops
after the men have played their little game of execution,
and scholars pick up the pieces
of the heavenly woman of Revelation,
grasping at umbilical straws for a meaning to what she gave.

Thin bible pages are dedicated to her lithe form,
her childbearing hips that filled out with the grace of God,
for Joseph’s carpenter hands to carve and clench
and give him cuckoo-sons,
but he is Joseph, and he can shout louder than she,
and raise hell to the Heavens
if he wants to.

She, fruit-bearing mother,
is only taken ****** to Heaven
because there was an angel
who requested something to pass the time.

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.

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.

I’d been too busy so much of the time,
that the requiem between one and another sunrise
seemed to be far too full of birdsong.
(a love song to the insomniacs of the world,
awake a million times over,
and a million times again for the sleepless
and the sick, world-weary passengers closing,
briefly, their tired eyes against the window of the Earth.)

Let’s say that the whole world is asleep
all at once. Seven and a half billion exhales,
seven and a half billion crumpled duvets
and grasping dream-hands, landing soft blows
against the mattress. What are they dreaming of?
Let’s say that they’re all dreaming of the same thing -
of the apocalypse, a kaleidoscope of little deaths
stretched out across the expanse of a dream.

Time, in dreams, is elongated; stretched out
like the pull of thick cornflour. A person —
any person, can live a thousand lives
in the space just above the nose,
where the eyes don’t meet and the dream wrinkles
the creases of age on the brow. Upon waking,
everyone will be a little bit older, and the great, catastrophic,
unreal World-Ender will fall asleep, a little out of time
with everyone else. The clocks strike into action
again. Just like in the dreams of a thousand lives,
except this time, my feet hit the ground.

i’ve got hollow bones like a little baby bird.
i tell myself that, when you pour yourself
into me. you’re liquid and i’m just a vessel,
a vase for some flowers. it would be easier
to love someone else, and i do, but i am still,
like the cool water’s liminal edge,
and i am primarily yours.

i’ve got rough skin from years of scrubbing
to make myself clean. our bathtub
has seen more of me our mirror has,
even more so the razor on the little ledge
that i use to shave my non-existent ****** hair
and pretend i’m someone else. like we’re
in a 50s movie about coming to not-quite
terms with disillusionment.

i’ve got eyes that stare too intently,
scared to blink away the ghost of you
that sits on the edge of the bed, all skin
and bone and more skin left over,
enough of it that i can grab onto and wrap
myself in. then i’ll set us both alight.

maybe i’m the one with hands that hurt,
i don't really know much of this anymore.
you are white-hot and violently intense,
the rock to which my hard place shore-crashes;
if you must be by my side, do it quickly
and painlessly, for i’ve had enough
of time and agony for a lifetime.

for two lifetimes, actually.
mine and yours.

This started off so well. I was in love,
and I was awake, and when I wasn’t
awake I was at least in bed with someone.
There’s a lot to be said
and so little time to say it in,
I even dreamed up a new colour.

That’s the big question
of science versus imagination.
Try and think of a new colour,
one that you can’t find on a spectrum
or a colour wheel. You can’t, right?

So the imagination has limits,
of course, but only insofar as the world
has limits. Blah blah, laws of physics,
blah blah, one day everyone you love
will die.

It’s not like that anymore. I’ve been
dreaming for so long that I’ve forgotten
how to wake up. Here, there are more colours
than there are words to describe them,
and more words than there are conscious
feelings, and thoughts,
like the world has been stripped back
to its coding, and I'm the virus
infecting it all with the terrifying
idea of newness.

Because — we’ve invented everything
we can invent, and dreamed up blueprints
for everything we can’t.
I think we’re done with the waking now,
and it’s time for the other to step in.
It’s almost done. But what can be done
when things are done?
Rest? A nice thought.
But we’re done with that, too.

He puffs out his chest and takes up space for two,
long before the temple is destroyed.
Nobody has told him ‘no’ in a long time,
and nobody has ever taught him how to be humble.
This is where he stands, tending his animals,
spitting and swearing and squaring up to the pigs,
his face ballooning in redness, all the majesty
of colour given to him alone by God.

His masculinity is ripe with each slain animal,
domesticated and reared for sacrifice to please another,
another man, for whom pride is not a virtue.
Nobody has ever taught him how to be wrong,
and so he is never wrong, right up until the moment
when the stone is in his hand and the blood is on the stone
and the brother is in the blood and the history is given to the brother.

For the whole of time, there has been the trinity,
and with four alive, it was simple maths of which brother
must be cut down. The strong must **** out the kind,
and Cain will go down fighting one day,
but not today. Today, there is a victor, and a title,
and a promise ripped from the heart of the father
that nobody will hurt him the way he hurts.

It is the stone that cycles back,
like rainwater or bad luck or the static feeling
of something going very wrong.
These men do not lie, they deceive,
and Cain was granted protection,
until his house fell down
and his body, under the rubble,
for the very first time,
knew the communion
of what it is like to lose.

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 must like me a lot, love me even;
the way you tear into my body means you
want it to be yours. tell me you want it
to be yours and i’ll let you in. i know you
get off on tearing the door down but this time
i’ll open it right up. i’m here for you,
that’s what they say before they ignore
your calls. not you. i can call and you
pick up with your sleepy voice and viscous sarcasm
and i say everything to you.

(it’s pathetic.)

i hear your voice in my head, instead of me
and my voice. it’s always there, thickly whispering
all the things that i try and tell myself, to me:
a love letter from back home, the temporal lobe.
i wish i knew what you wanted from me
because every version of you that i create
tells me awful things, how it hates me,
how i should hate me, too.

(you should.)

so what part of this will survive? will it be me,
putting myself first again (selfish), or will it be you,
headstrong and fast and violent and so unlike me?
so unlike how i love and crave the atoms of you.
so unlike how i feel, how you tell me
i’m supposed to feel. what is it that i love? you.
what is it that i hate?
what is it that i hate?

Have you ever slept on an airplane?
What I mean, of course, is —
have you ever slept in one place
and woken up in another?

Have you ever been a child
and believed in teleportation,
if only because you fell asleep on the old sofa
and were carried to bed in weary arms?

What I’m trying to say is,
have you ever changed states?
Have you ever been a person,
and become a memory?

Have you ever opened up an old box
of photographs, and found that you
remember places, but not people?
All those people in the background are just…

people in the background.
Have you ever broken down?
Like a car stalling on train tracks —
have you ever cried when only night can hear?

I suppose what I’m asking
for is validation. Recognition
that I’m not the only liquid-being
trying to fit myself into a tall glass.

I have done and become
all of these things, and now my body
is a jigsaw of memory
trying to fit back in the box

without disassembling myself
into little parts —
like doing so would make me
the in-between, the part of the movie

that everybody sleeps through.

I’m told to seek penance in the rosary,
and I want to throw the bible in their faces,
because how can they forget Lot’s Wife so easily?
How can trauma be so effortlessly muddled
in the word of the Lord?
How am I supposed to forget all that happened to me?

It is my fault, I’ve been told,
for looking back,
for dwelling on it until the bitter salt
becomes me, and I am a pillar,
but I will not forget so easily.

I cannot forget, if at all,
and those men in white robes speak testaments
of electric shock therapy until I am drooling,
and they are collecting it in a vial,
and it’s another story about trauma
that becomes seasoning for the lamb.

It is my fault, I think,
as I look back
and wonder what could have been done differently.
What I could have said or done
to prevent the men of faith
from ripping me to shreds
in their own stories.
Why am I,
not quite feminine and not quite fragile,
just a story to be told over beers and whiskey
about how I am a stepping stone
to your pillar?

Why do you get to be the pillar?
Why do you get to be the stone?
Why am I the salt-like spider webs,
stronger than your steel
but broken by your diamond hands,
born from the coal that I forged?