Sometimes I still get like that
think I might turn eight, wake up
screaming into the night-
it's too real, I'm terrified of my own insides.
Sometimes I can't remember
if it was a dream,
because since then panic has felt
like choking on water
that tastes like the world is
too real, tastes like not coping
tastes like knocks on the door
telling you
grow up.
This time you can't sink beneath
navy blue carpets so you
see a swimming pool, think
hey, maybe I can jump in to cool my sadness down.

I was the child they taught to swim
when you left, thinking
that maybe that if I knew not to
drown then making eye contact
wouldn't feel like making myself
smaller to fit into tighter spaces,
wouldn't taste like acid into places
where only oxygen fits.

Sometimes I still get like that
time flips itself over, scraping
the pool tiles with blunt fingers-
how old was I the first time you asked me what I ate
today, am I okay,
am I okay?
Sometimes the dream reacurres,
though now living tastes like
trying to swallow everything above
the chlorine surface, and
I can't remember the last time
I was terrified of
my insides.

I'm not screaming at night any more,
though this time no one arrives to pull me back
to the places
where I can
breathe.
I'm comfortably numb until I realise
I'm eight, sadness is cold and
I can't swim.

Found on the pavement
from fingertip to shoulder
laid out
stretched out
onto
a palm
like one of those beautiful
twisted
daisy heads.
Stroked hair behind an ear
and whispered
“you're fading out, honey”
and fire spread
from limb to the door frame
and you shut yourself out
downstream
cut the yarn with oversized scissors
and then
fingertip to shoulder
collarbone to knee,
waist to heel,
bent and folded.
They found you
like one of those beautiful
twisted
daisy heads.

You watch the plastic frame meld into itself,
The second hand turning inward
Smoothly running down the walls like fingertips trying to find their hands,
Tapping the pencil against the desk,
Tapping soles onto tiled floors,
Toes rhyming in spite of themselves, waiting.

On the creaking wooden chair in the corner, hanging on the scaffold, in the circular mirror, distorted and twisted and folding. It stands in the shadows. It lurks in the school playground while parents wait for their children, it’s a runaway train, and it’s the ink streaming down the window pane, it’s the clock melting inwards.
its golden fluidity and baby blue subtleties.
It’s the reason why you wake in the middle of the night,
gasping into darkness and grappling with loose ends... it was just a dream.
The reason you turn a corner just to look back behind you, why you double-take in the mirror, question where did I go?
Looking at nothing, staring into the bleak dark, it lurks. Awaits.
It waits in the form of a child holding a red balloon, staring into our blind spots.
Like shadows, when the sun rotates away from behind the playground wall you know, just then, now, in that full circle...
it’s about to run out.
You bend over backwards to relate to the moonlight dancing on the floor of its own reflections. It shows itself on beer bottles from better nights, you cross one leg over the other, position yourself,
folded linen.
Rushing to endless deadlines for nowhere o’clock, last call for the runaway train, struggling with human concepts.
You’re simply a sum of parts: an addition of flesh, limbs, old and broken battered bones, blind spots.
All the places you can’t see, can’t feel, can’t reach.
Loose ends meet themselves in the corner of that same old dusty room,
the folded linen crumples to the floor,

the red balloon bursts.