You will feel deeply
Little girls can write like dragon ladies,
galvanise poems and spit them out metallic
slipped through pavement portal cracks
I don’t want to write like a girl anymore
there’s no air holes.
Dragon ladies told me not to
I stuck googley eyes on my conscience
diversion tactics
I hope the world doesn’t eat me
crack sun-roof open
limbs steer in different directions and going around in circles.
No canoe
I want to be an radio ooost
me in their karaoke voices
if you stop being yourself, it will set you free.
Cha-cha-cha.
if you stop being yourself, it will set you free.

The narcissistic urge flips eggs now.
Our ex-veteran father-figure gets a hamster, calls it Snuffles.
The thing you don’t know until the end of the script of the Tarantino-twist is that our protagonist sits
rocking back and forth in
a barren room inside a strait-jacket.

Meanwhile, our enemy shouts
something along the lines of:
"grab a spoon
I hope they don’t wash their hands"
The stones fallen off their strings,
gunshots hotwire themselves away from
a dubstep kind of drilling, the pipe dream
of an intimate email relationship.
Shout again,
"I hope you never feel those clammy hands.
Blaarghh"
Your diner eggs stink
I chucked up
In the kitchen bin.

Let the babble stop
Let the brain farts cease
Let pleasure be your guide
And the poet slip into their persona,
Like a performance uniform,
A slip dress
An existential throw up of thoughts like
Bad Chinese food.
The kind that climbs out of Tupperware,
slippers ready

Of Tupperware and ready slippers
***** out takeaway rice.
Performance uniforms sit up in bed,
Babbling about existential poets.
The bad Chinese food
Waltzes with its guide,
Brain dribbles out of nostrils.
Dear night-shoes,
This babble has ceased,
Pleasurely.

The day after my childhood self wouldn't leave the old house and cupboards, I sat in the dark with my boxes and these pretend grown-up versions of myself.
I'm losing my favourite memory, I cant find the right side of paper but I will always flip the page. I know I am stuck. Still seeing the image of your skirts disappearing around old pine door frames, try to run after the hem to ask you where I left the right box. Can't even find the words to ask.
Sometimes the last thing we ever get to say is “goodbye, old house”, we don't always get a chance to kiss it on the cheek before we leave.
That nothing we lost once was inside you the whole time.
I remember the private hospital rooms, we know that for that much money you have to switch of the part of you that won't stop dying.
You still visit.
You still visit in the form of robins following me home, of ghosts enclosed whispering in a space reserved,
breath suspended in mid air,
the very last one.
I made a room of ghosts for you.
And if I could have stopped time
I would have paused it in the middle of this room.

Open the yellow memory box one last time.

"There is a strange place between just about and not quite" she says and you imagine her jumping off that ledge again and shudder to yourself,
think "I can’t ******* do this anymore.
I feel like I’ve swallowed a dictionary of her words".
She used to say ‘I love you’ and you’d think "from the inside out"
'Fiberscope:
a fibre-optic device for viewing inaccessible internal structures,
especially in the human body.'
She tells you definitions can be beautiful.
Swallowing a fish eye lens to try and meet you
on the same page, looking
over and over into your own insides
knowing you can’t get any further into yourself.
Interruption
"but for ****’s sake I wish you were here",
we expose ourselves to the sound of Pink Floyd and laugh our gilded throats slit like we’re going mad around the same carousel.
'Endoscopy:
a surgical procedure
used to look inside the body to examine the interior of a hollow ***** or cavity.
Unlike most other medical imaging techniques,
endoscopes are inserted directly into the *****.'
She smells like soft skin on a postcard, like holding the thing from home closer
and trying to make it part of yourself.
You tighten the door hinges when she’s near them like trying to catch her in the inverted gap of the door,
expressing the art of a good catch.
She could never understand why you were so empty
and think "I am golden I am pure ******* gold,
when I die they’ll make a suit of my insides"
you're Zeus turned Midas, touching her she turns cold,
but at least now she's always radiant for you and
standing on a podium you made out of her bones when she told you
she was struggling with herself,
there is a strange place between just about and not quite and one day
I hope to find her there.

The child in the pushchair leans forwards.
Touches the wheels while they move, later this revolves to watching wheels of a bus
and wishing to be
underneath
them and maybe we're all just looking for a way out and a getaway driver,
maybe this room with a view we built to ruin is flooding
and we're pressing our
open lips
to the ceiling, grappling for a last breath
and pushing time for a second more
and maybe that escape route is waiting round the corner, a lamppost with flowers cellotaped to it, a
place away from the place
our parents kicked us out,
drove us to the middle of nowhere and made us walk ourselves home, telling us this is a metaphor of life, waiting for a place for us to rest our blistered ankles and bruised wrists,
a place where there's someone we lost waiting for us, holding our their hand to bring us home,
but I guess,
maybe, for now
we're gonna have to stare at buses and wish for those pushchair wheels and the days we stared at the pavement moving beneath us and wanted to be anything
but a painting on the road.