There's no fire to be started
with paper matches,
but the real thing
sets the whole house alight.
It all goes up in smoke;
burning up your books
and shattering your windows,
so that your safe space
is no more.

I have to make myself empty;
starve myself away.
I have to exist less,
I can't stand my existence.
I'm taking up too much space.

I cut myself to fit,
small enough for your shadow.
Make myself scarce before
you can give me the slip.
So there's less of me
to give
and less of me to take.

How small should I make myself
so that I'm not too much.

I want to take apart my skin
when the sun is too bright
and the world is too full
of people who will never know me.

I want to open the rivers
inside my wrists and empty them;
to pour myself away
the way I pour whisky
into my empty stomach,
and my hypothermic limbs
into stranger's beds.

I live my life on an island,
and my world is small.
I stand for hours on my shore,
waiting for the plates of the earth
to shift beneath me;
to carry me across the oceans
to continents that I will never reach
on my own.

I loved you in the timeless hours
of a dark city.
In the morning, who you were
had been replaced;
the people that we were together
no longer there.
All the memories erased, so you
could love somebody new.

But the shadow of you still lingers
incompletely;
wandering through my slideshow memories
like the glimpse of your eyes fleeting
round the carousel.
A flash under the cinema lights,
over before it began.

Now I'm on someone else's mind
but I'm still under you
in mine.

Black Chrysler.

White Ferrari.

Loaded barrel.

Dark corner.

Back seat.

Trigger, trigger.

Streetlight.

Unmade bed.

Bathroom floor.

Bang, bang.

Good girls sew their mouths shut.
We stitch our eyes closed
and turn down the volume
of our breathing.

Dressed up in stereotypes
with our limbs twisted
for a taste of something
of substance.

No trespass of emotion;
no warmth to expose us
to cold beds and cold hands.

Good girls sew their minds shut
and do as they're told.