We talk politics in the shower.
You shampoo your beard,
I condition my armpit hair.
Good morning coffee breath.
I love you like a palindrome.
Tragic comedy, our physical love stretched
thin
over distance.
Endings always differ.
Moon circles scream it’s raining on me.
Serotonin’s been locked up for years, I put her somewhere safe.
Check you’re alive with a finger *****, comedy of errors sings an ode in my left ear.
Here
beard bristles
brush hair
light back catch
sensitivity sits
less lower lip
fold
selves
in
scene end
stage right
pick up towel
EXIT.

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.