Run your fingers
   softly
Down my spine,
Trace the contours of my rib cage piano,
The cracks in the ivory white keys
That are my shattered, fragmented bones;
The way your trembling lips
Danced across the ballroom of my porcelain wrist
  One two three
      Two two three
         Across my subtly scarred corpse,
Waltzing rhythm
   faltering
With each drag of your kiss,
Leeching sadness as a blade with blood,
   purifying,
      somehow.

Yet your lips had learnt to love the sad side
   of me;
Fallen from cliffs of scars to waves of crashing blood,
   as simply as one may fall asleep;
A wingless butterfly,
   falling helplessly in love.
For, perhaps, love is what allows the wings to grow,
   Perhaps, love is the seed of the destruction of free-fall;
Love destroys love.
  The way you destroy me,
     I destroy me.

And so you leech the sadness you fell in love with,
My ecstasy seeping from your mere presence,
   A flower rising from the cracks of a grave,
   As your love rots with the bones below --
The ivory white ribcage
   c r a c k e d
Like the shattered keys
   of a grand piano,
Haunting music
      hanged
   by its own happy heartstrings,
Cruel love,
You ripped apart the fragmented bones,
Leaving only minor keys;
The passivity of the stars,
   matched only by you,
      by the silence
of your harmony
to my saddened melody;
   the silence, radiating
      from the shadowed cracks of my
ribcage piano.
And so you took away my sadness
And so I was no longer who you loved
And so you slowly sought to shatter me,
No longer able to taint my beautiful sadness,
With your trembling
   beautiful
lips.

*j.s.

I beg you,
Do not make this out to be a love note;
Do not romanticise my words
     until a list of all that is wrong with you
          becomes a letter in a bottle, washed up on an island’s shore.
Do not teach the child I will never have
     that the locked wooden box of dated but unsent letters hidden beneath her bed
          will one day become a novel.
They are all addressed to you--
   just as every thought I think echoes with your name
              every song is about you
              every tear burns my skin with the acidity of your touch
         the smoke from
              every cigarette tastes of you.
It is you.
It is you
             who is the black mist enveloping my lungs from the inside out,
It is you
             swirling in my hollow veins
                as they wrap themselves like chains
                   around my organs, screaming for night,
and you capture my beating heart.


And it is you
     who tells us to teach our children
                         to make sure to say their pleases and their thank-yous,
And we taught them not to talk to strangers,
  but we never taught them to say
                                                      ‘no’. --
Now I don’t speak to the kids hanging out on the corner
And I don’t speak to the man when he pulls up his van,
And now I don’t speak
                                  when I'm lying in bed
you never taught me to say no
I don’t speak when your hand runs down my body
          like I am something you own
          like my bones are the ivory keys of a grand piano
               and you must hit every note on your glissando
descending
   to
hell.



I don’t speak as you wrap yourself around me
metal chains on a summer’s day
I close my eyes
            and listen to my organs screaming for night
                   like a child who just wants her bedtime story,
                                                          ­   her mummy to come home,
                   like a child who is not afraid
                               of monsters in her head,
                          or of monsters under the bed,
                          or of you,
Lying
     beside her.


And we scream for night
   And we close our eyes
      And we float up into a moonless sky.
The definition of a black hole is
               ‘a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can
                escape’.
If it is the matter that creates the pull that traps the matter,
   then you are not so much in me
         and I am not so much in you
               as we are trapped inside each other.
The world made up of people and
      people made up of world,
                                          like Romeo and Juliet,
      we do not exist without the other,
                                          you and I.


For the words
           immorality and immortality
                                            may be frighteningly similar, but there is a difference between
                 apathy and anaesthesia;
I do not close my eyes to shut you out,
           I close my eyes because it is only darkness that can make the space between my bedroom walls appear infinite;
           It is only music that lets me hear your screams as you suffocate mine;
                  only smoke that lets me taste your toxicity as my ashes spread like a virus through your veins.


I want to die.
And I'm taking you down with me,
   So don’t you dare tell me to teach the child I will never have
      that her scars seek attention,
         or that she needs them as proof of what you have done to her mind;
   Don’t you dare teach us that the rope from which we hang is a diamond necklace;
          that corpses are more beautiful when drained of blood,
             that we are more beautiful when broken.


Dear world,
   I beg you,
Do not make this out to be a love note;
Do not romanticise my words
     until a list of all that is wrong with you
          becomes a letter in a bottle, washed up on an island’s shore.
Do not teach me that my suicide note is poetry
     when our existence is intertwined
          and my death is yours,
          and you are too cowardly to do it for the both of us,
  but, darling,
                    so am I.
So please,
   I beg you,
You can make this out to be a love note,
                                             a letter in a bottle,
   just close your eyes;
      float up into a moonless sky;
         dissolve into infinity.
                                            Die with me--.
                                                           ­                                                       *j.s.

I think of you in colours that don't exist --
     that's not to say that I don't think of you at all,
          because, of course, technically every colour exists:
Even the ones we cannot imagine,
   Even the ones we cannot see.
Even the ones either side of the spectrum that light up the notes used for money, not music, because the notes used for money
   are
      not
         always
            real.
Even the ones either side of the spectrum that light up the heat of your body like your presence does the room
      and your eyes do my smile
           and your smile does my eyes;
You tell me that technically every colour exits,
   even if we cannot see it,
   even if we cannot imagine it –

For think of it now.
          Imagine in your head a colour that does not exist.
                    Now describe it to me.
Is it a splash of red with tints of a yellowy-blue?
Is it a pinky-purple hue,
    a hint of green, turquoise, maroon, sapphire, olive, violet?
Does it already exist in colours we already have names for,
      have we lived so long that every thought we think is no longer our own,
            every thought we think has been thought of before,
I think of you in colours that don’t exist
   but so has everyone else.

We cannot see it,
      we cannot imagine it.
But if we cannot imagine something that does not exist
   simply because we are confined to describing it
      in the words of an already existent language,
   what does that say about us?
We can imagine a waterfall of chocolate,
       a glass elevator bursting through the roof;
   shrinking potions and growing potions and talking rabbits.
We can imagine standing on the top of a building
      looking out over the greying city lights
            with lungs full of water
            a noose round our necks
            and the sole belief in our heads that we are jumping to fly
We can rewrite the future and make up the past
We can imagine wizards and witches and fairies and goblins
We have unicorns, ******* it,
     we have God.

And yet when I present to you a lover,
   an artist,
      standing in front of you now,
         yearning to make you his canvas,
You are too scared to fall in love,
              too scared to admit that you don’t have the words in your encapsulating little language to describe the things that you feel towards him.
For he does not need language,
   he does not need words.
He will stand here now,
   in front of you,
      and let you grace his collarbones with a diamond noose,
                          crown his withered corpse in a wreath of daisies,
                          dress his bones in slashes of rubies.
He will tear himself apart for you,
     for you,
     for you to watch galaxies flow out of his veins,
  velvet red blood screaming unwritten poetry,
  a torrent of unimagined colours pouring into him and out of him
          and with his one last remaining breath
              and a trembling hand,
he picks up his paintbrush
      and draws you into orbit,
  and like his fingers used to trace your shattered ribcage
    like the keys of an ivory piano,
he traces the outline of your lips.
And at last you draw breath,
         to whisper his name, to whisper your love, and all that remains
   is silence.
And you choke on the air and sound is still
         for all words exist so none can be spoken and suddenly everything
   is black.
And I think of you in colours that don’t exist
     like the wolf howls in lament of the side of the moon he will never see
          for all colours exist, and when I think of you,
there are none.

                                                      *-j.­s.

Our bodies lay,
   shivering and intertwined,
under the clear night's stars,
   under the watch of your blackened
window
but he is not you
     (whoever you are)
and so the way he warms me
  is nothing
     nothing compared to the chill I feel
radiating from the emptiness of your
bedroom window,
          where I long to be.

                                                      *-j.s.

If love is an art-form,
   I beg you,
      do not choose me.
Do not paint,
   with fingertips tracing my skin,
The colour of your love,
   with the slashes of your paintbrush upon my flesh,
In a torrent of red velvet,
   surging from your screaming veins.
If I lie there in wait, draped over cotton bedsheets,
   I beg you
      do not make me your canvas.
      Do not make me your art
and leave me
                       hanged
                                     for all the world to see
   while you marvel at the beauty
you created.

                                                            *-j.s.

Sugar
A thousand colours combine
        in a war, a rage against darkness
and nothingness, the evils and goods of this anaesthetised numbness
residing within me,
                blinding with the promise of the blank canvas
                                                             the porcelain wrist before the cancer takes hold.
For that is what I am, a Cancer.
   A breath of hot air against your innocent flesh,
         suffocating, intoxicating.
   You yearn for me in all I am
      from the moment dark hands drag me from life
      til your lips close around my scent,
            an envelope of love letters
            you never sent.

I am your addiction
    (let me be the sugar within you)

               your infatuation
                   (stir me into your tea)

                              your drug.

Let me in.
Let me in
                  and I will **** you from the inside out,
I will ignite your eyes with flames
                  and the world will marvel at your beauty,
   like acid at the back of your throat
      tears burning
         like fireflies
            like embers dancing
                  none but me will see the ashes fall inside you.
A black snow,
   drifting slowly down inside you
A black snow,
   nothingness has won; the war is over
   as your speech becomes slurred
A black snow,
   come
      to make me grey
         as I watch your mind unravel
                                           like the wire of an old cassette tape
                                                                                           and wind around my neck.





You thought it made sense,
this story.
Like the words had an order
Like your footsteps had an order
as you danced across the ballroom of my flesh.
one two three
       two two three
engraving your history
into my skin.
As though it cannot be undone,
Like the letters cannot unwrite themselves
Like you cannot find yourself
in a snare of black cassette wire
screaming
as it winds itself around the tree trunks and branches that scatter your mind;
piecing me back together.
Like the letters cannot unwrite themselves
the snow cannot fall upwards
the ashes cannot fall upwards

Like you cannot find yourself lost in the forest of this story you found yourself in
and retake
       retake
your very last breath.

You thought it made sense,
this story

*J.S.

i will sketch myself a gun
and load it
with toxic lead scrawled neatly, letters looping like a noose,
with scratches on chalkboards, like footprints on the moon
        and scars on my wrist.
i will give these words the power to ****
    and with one last remaining breath
       i'll place it against the fire, beating in my temples
and words and letters and music
  will flow,
    into me and out of me
an endless whisper
   of poems
   surging through my veins.


and all will at last be dark.

*-j.s