God is a hungover slob
who doesn’t wear pants,
I will miss you like a house on fire.

This poem has been waiting for me out back for days
it’s been waiting for me to wake up    see it    offer it a spot next to me under the blanket
but I’m still waking up in a cold sweat in shock from the way it’s eyes find me
this poem has been waiting for me patiently
until now
waiting at the fence with a cowboy hat under one arm and a sad smile tucked under the other
condolences are what it offered me when you were found misplaced cold on a hotel room floor
oh you pretty things
hands bruised knuckles frayed like old rope eyes not meeting the right ends whizzing past the mark every time everyone everyday passes and into something other
pink fingernails scraping the dirt from the side of your face
a thumb brushes under your lip and you can’t smile to meet it at the corner of your mouth
it’s reassuring you at the corner of the street and you chase it off until it becomes a golden glimmer too far ahead
can still hear it whispering
tag you’re    it    somewhere near your left shoulder
the calloused hands are back and they tell you
to stay far away from being with anyone that reminds you of your parents
you go in the opposite direction    trip over a tree root and end up flat on your back
staring at the sky
the way the trees are scared of intimacy too    they won’t hold each other’s boughs    fingers ever stretching    they sustain it to let the forest floor below breathe
and you’re grateful as you settle on it
let your mind go blank    and feel yourself come out of the other side    you want to see the other side of this
where breathing is a bit easier
not such a shallow pool     and you can meet your lovers eyes without a trembling breath paused in your esophagus
not where there’s something rising    and again you keep waking up    
falling in each direction
it goes from tripping over a pavement    through to falling straight through nothing    
feeling rather sick now    can’t remember the glimmer in his eyes    the glint you were before you were born
not even a thought
nothing that could be abused or stretched or held against your own will

I’ve been scrubbing underneath my fingernails
ever since I pressed them into my palm to create half moon shapes
my skin but your imprint    your trauma still in my handbag
I tired to throw it into the sea but it caught a wave each time   and I’d find it each Tuesday
washed up in front of my feet    looking at me sad and sort of forlorn
I couldn’t step on it    put it out of it’s misery
needing to shower every time I hear your name   I want to hear nothing from it

been biting my own lip in the cold again    responses coming out delayed and slow
the skin rash a slow rejection    the bust lip from the holding back screams    the cells inside me growing where they shouldn’t from each time I let you pass through
rip up the carpets
   pull the paper off the walls
and demand I clean up the mess    
I imagine my body telling me a story as things begin to catch up in head    too    trying to find my toolbox in the chaos
letting my brain go fuzzy against it
there’s nothing in here    butting against this wall    nothing good anyways
learning to breathe    learning to lean    letting the rubber band go slack for better reasons

letting the poem catch up    open the hatch on the gate and come inside    a wry smile on her face
she never left
but she was hoping the next time she saw you things would be different
and it washes over    they are
when you can’t breathe remember          when a tsunami hit the house
remember how it took everything away to where it came from    and you smiled
nothing standing
and you thought how beautiful it was
the whole house wrecked
and gone and
you grinned at how lovely nothing could be
to not be overwhelmed for the first time
the walls that trapped you when you thought you were home    taken back
no more cabin fever
how glorious it was having     nothing    but a blank slate    and two hands
how things coming apart can be things repairing themselves    how
everything came together when the walls
came down.

It took him years to stop loving her,
For the impression of her eyes to fade.
There'd be dreams and nightmares,
He'd see her around town.
He could never really move on from her perfume, the colour of her eyes in the morning, sunlight bouncing off her figure;
The way her nose crinkled as she laughed.

The dog is nine years
three months
six days old
and still counting,
the old man sits and counts up in
a chair rocking on an old porch,
creaking floorboards faded wooden again
from turquoise,
turning raw in their old age.
Parts of the floorboard have chipped away beneath
the chairs wasted slats
and yet the old man still sits, counting
down
time
like a train whistling at a
trespasser on the tracks
like a stray hair curling from
it's braid
get off those tracks
'cause you know it's not your place.
All we ever do is rot back down to
the floors we came from
and maybe
all we end up doing is completing a week
and then we're not counting anymore,
and maybe
the chair doesn't rock back to dust
and forth to
nine years
three months
and six days old
and we sit on our old porches
watching the train tracks and
maybe we know it's not the
time or the place
but a train whistles at the
trespasser
and we watch the young girl
and we count down, looking away
when it happens.
But we're not counting any more
and we sink into the porches we came from.

Photographers step out of hazy stairwells, tired eyes adjusting to dim light, looking for
their next muse.
“Works of art take time” they tell themselves
they look for the next spark of intrigue, their next fix.
You’ll find them on public transport, in old cafes:
cameras slung around their necks like billiard boards captioned ‘the end is nigh’.
Buzzing with anticipation of their next good catch, biting the lips of their disgruntled
faces like ancient gladiators biting the dust.
Castaways, oil paintings once brilliant and beautiful thrown into apartment blocks and
grey buildings,
ruins of art cast adrift by time.
Haunted by still frames and possibilities, all burned onto retinas, they stumble across
traffic jams;
finding beautiful people, forcing themselves into their lives.
Fleeting whispers rotate into double takes and flickers on the film of a Polaroid camera;
the subjects become muses,
cities are reborn as golden
flood into spotlights:
vibrant, reckless, insomniac.

I am not the sophisticated underdog,
I trip and fall through door frames
Always unannounced.

I am the wavering circle,
I give myself away too early in the game
Always a red herring.

No energy ever dies.
I put you near my bathroom sink,
in the hope your energy tells me nice things
in the morning.

Our          mistakes
mask   themselves
like                     me
outside of
            Sainsbury's

             frantically.

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.

"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.

Big fluffy dressing gowns keep misbehaving and stuffing themselves into un-rounded empty spaces and the spaces are shrinking so excuse me BUT I’M A LITTLE STUCK OVER HERE like the nightmare about losing teeth, about being too small and driving a big van, a massive van down a long hill, it gets steeper and THERE’S NO BRAKES. MAYBE IT’S THE MARRIAGE OF TWO PERFECT ENTITIES, ME AND THE DRESSING GOWNS, that is. But I’d expected it to pan out a little differently than end in the middle of a Bridget Jones film or some other badly frequented metaphor glued together with lollipop sticks. Who are these people who don’t find themselves biting into deep pure, gross, clogged nothing when they have an empty wall in front of them? I bet THEY DANCE FABULOUSLY with toasters.

It was a few days after it all
when I clung
to the ship that wasn’t really a ship, or you told me so
I,
I would have believed it could have been anything
a block of cheese, a fandango,
that old porch
I’ve been dreaming of for a few years
the scene doesn’t end but
Frank, the jumper wearing fellow-
he’s shaped a little oddly- he
told me to leave the fridge open
and you see I got a little distracted the world wasn’t quite there
and the machines weren’t quite machines
and I couldn’t pull things off the walls like I could pull
fishes
fishes out of my eyes- something a little backwards
didn’t we used to keep this behind the teabag jar?
I,
I thought the lid was
superglued with something a little tougher than
soft touch
blues
the melody calls out from one of those dog-eared
spitting instruments and we
look at each other in shock-
it knows something we don’t.

Things are falling out onto the floor, bits and stuff- old hoover batteries
doing a bit of a jazzy buzzcut dance like jam hand sandwiches that moment where your
hands can’t skate fast enough and can’t stop tying themselves in knots
elephant trunk knots protruding precariously like weird plate show tunes breaking the moment, wave, pebble beach, ugh.
What a lovely space question mark, it is?
I thought you were blocks from fake eyebrow movements
the childhood adverts like many sided shapes  Michael Landy sheds his dose
Mavis plays the harmonica cha-cha-cha
the floor caves in but you don’t need it
you’re held up by sheer, pure spite, very little
IKEA scrambled eggs on toast this is how I scramble it, like bad cement mix
eyelid blink pin drop sounds like not fitting I hate your shoes, put them in the kitchen bin
and move me to the top of the wardrobe, I like to be very, very far from
the floor.

Press to exit
    the door glowed green for the others
pink boiler biohazard suit
     something I was made of once
swaying a net
   something that became made of me
I peer respectively over the edge of the bowl
   drooping on the wall to the left
speaker hits reverb
   hanging in it’s sadness
there was a time I was afraid but not anymore
   extinct to each other
they took her apart
  the end of a new species
I am a body that shouldn’t be here anymore
   last seen to slip through the crack in the door
you are giraffes in human skin
     fitting our insides to our shirts like buttons
I went home in the human bodies
     they took me with them under their skin

If I looked like I was dying as much as I feel it
my teeth would be the only thing left of my face
the door to an abandoned cabin
my creaking vacant ribcage
would be the only thing left  
I need reminding sometimes
this ****** old place
I call this home
the roof is leaking
the carpet is a funny colour

the brickwork is coming loose
and there’s some kind of invasive plant
growing up the walls
it’s dying from the cold, too
but it’s still home
and while you’re here you’ll
be respectful
you’ll be respectful enough to
remove your shoes
not track mud through the hallways

I can’t always understand what’s she’s saying to me
but me and this territory
have reclaimed each other
there’s a flag in each of our moons
I don’t trust anyone else’s hands in my ribcage pockets
I don’t want to wear anyone else’s smile
It’s taken me an awful long time to see
the light coming through
to sit in it’s warmth
another day always follows the sunset around here
it loops and I know it’s coming
something to finally count on
she knows being around her is a pleasure

home is an abandoned cabin
made of my ribcage
while you’re here you’ll
be respectful
respectful enough
to remove your shoes.

In my dream last night
someone said they'd seen you
I saw a strand of red hair
that I was being too optimistic to recognise as my own
there was nothing I could remember
it's really not much
and I know you're not coming back
but these moments give me something
something like some part of you still being here
even if it's just me
something like you'll turn around any second
something like you'll be back soon

(One day I'll be older than you were)

You turn to me
our eyes are the same
but yours are bigger with concern
you say
but... there's no connection
wringing your hands out
like a cloth you don't understand
a letter addressed directly
to my inner saboteur
an answer for everything
comes out of my closed mouth
suddenly an adult you weren't ready for
with a wry smile
isn't that the whole point?
I'm the thing that's still here
and I don't think you're stuck
up there
anymore
in the stratosphere

I can see the light coming through
beginning to flood us
there’s something honest about being here
call it understanding
give it a willing name
it knows exactly what to say
I need me the most.

Take me home
My heart is tired and sad
By the warm microwave light
I’ve got the blues

Josephine, the train carriage in front of me wobbles and it is eerie, I wonder what it would be like to press my hand into its rubber sides, testing out for some sign of reproach. I love you something rotten. Like a stuffed bear toy with the nose chewed off, a book dropped in the bath, something where my toes won’t dare stop to uncurl and sighs, slow down into somewhere around the place of deep, warm comfort. Eric Clapton’s Layla played slowly, Elvis hasn’t stopped, can’t stop falling in love with the way your eyes close, Fleetwood are still waiting at the bus stop where we left, and the Lumineers croon in the voice of Cleopatra. You’re crying on a train listening, thinking ‘Oh dear. I can’t get enough of this’, it’s like burying my head in the sand. It’s a nice crinkle in the corner of his eyes, it’s like coming home to everywhere at once. Like seeing it all hug you into one, the place where you lost everything welcomes you home, you find your house keys, your blue scarf, the basket of odd socks. Josephine, you seem like the road sign for stop and road works and this way to the Midlands all at once. You’re the last human left.

Last ditch attempts and descents without grace.
Darkness was diffusing into ambers. He’d been deteriorating for a while now, slowly, abruptly, and then with the fall of the summer months completely off the other end of the scale. He’d felt it in adrenaline coursing through his veins, known it when spilled liquids seeped into carpets that weren’t his own. But this was it. He faced the final breech of his own standards, or what was left, with bare feet, exposed eyes, all the while knowing he was corrupted.
He had brought himself inches away from a descent, drawn himself through the chaos, grasped his gnarled hand around what had held him back, and pulled, pulled his own cold body from the lifeless thud on the floor, pulled himself here, and now his toes curled over the edges of what had been his life.
Gathering the last vestiges of his age and time, Bram stepped forwards into unfilled air. Foot first, the ground drawing closer; he watched the atmosphere fly past in kaleidoscope. Like all inevitabilities, the moon extinguished the sunlight, both knowing their places elsewhere.

Good morning    body
I called you in for a meeting
    because
you can’t sleep                         again
and I just wanted to tell you
        you don’t already seem to know
and no one can read your writing
you already know what you’re wearing tomorrow and you’ll pay the gallery in the morning

and    it's all fine
and you’re very much allowed to yawn     sigh    or take a
deep breath    

I know January keeps trying to go on
and on and on and on
like you’re not already over it
a few weeks ahead of yourself
like we’re not all stuck in Deja-vu
despite the fact that it’s fun to type out
soothing repetition
like a hot tea lavender oil or the last smile on the page
like a consoling yoga chant

it’s time you heard this
where are the words you’re hiding?
when you sit down and say you can’t do this again
I will tell you     I think this might be growing
it was you under the pile of clothes the whole time
holding the remote
murmuring prophetically in the corner
it was you    you see
you already said
you’re everything you know
you’re everything you need

Good morning    body
I called you in to talk to me
for us to meet each other

letters to yourself are the new shopping list

or at least
they’re calming to write when you can’t sleep.

I’ve been loving you
for at least three minutes.
I’ve been waiting oh-so-tentatively for
your two backward left feet by the
warm microwave light, for
a waltzily slip
of ultimate falsehood out of the fridge.
Oh darling, yo-ooo-ooo-ou
send me.
You, you, youuu
waltz with me in the warm
kitchen light,
across the checkerboard floor.
Darling, yoo-ooo-ou
fold me up and
toss me
oh-so-lovingly into the microwave.
My legs, oh my marigold legs!
Pop out the funny sides,
false and daintily.
Your limbs with no mouths
but light fingers and a thorough
set of skills with the hoover.
I saw the sink disembodied
in the light wearing
a pretty ‘do.
My hair on all the faucets.
Dear Mother, I…

As with all of the big, great losses
not very much from here forward
is going to be      the same
I know it won't
I do want you to applaud
on your way out   though
despondently, once again
the harmonica begins to play.

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.

My hands fidget.
I will tell you when I see you that
my fingers could break when I speak,
loose from the chicken wire houses that pin them to nail holes
no one sees and my words could snap
with them, straight down their spines.
My hands fidget and my tongue trips.
One day I won’t be allowed to see your eyes, your eyes when the sun hits them and they turn green, your eyes when they're blue, when you're being real. Or both.
The sun is in your eyes and it's setting.
I think I could be the moon,
we could meet at every eclipse,
create our own lightshow in the sky or make them notice us just for five minutes,
the kids sat on steps behind the sports centre,
I will tell you when I see you that you are so ******* smart you could ruin the world with it, so why can’t I tell you this, so why can’t my hands stay still?
I want to feel the way my mouth tingles when we sit, you murmuring in my ear that you could spend all day here,
alone with the indents of each other's lips.
I guess if we ruined the world I wouldn't even feel Numb, the Nirvana song.
My hands fidget.
Recently I stuck a sticker over my fear of death to try and be as brave as you and now I am Nevermind,
I can't feel a thing.
My tongue sits still when I try to speak about thinking and when I think of losing you I see Topcat, Pink Panther and this time my mind trips over itself.
I chew my lips and the corners of my mouth close.
I can’t see in the dark like I can’t breathe when I see cartoons like I can’t see **** when you say we need to talk like I’m scared of the ******* dark so please walk me home.
You find my hair bobbles at your house and I'm sorry that that last one wasn’t a metaphor.
I imagine the space behind your closed eyelids looks like a dark place at 3am where you exhale smoke.
I imagine the space behind mine is inhaling, coughing and static in the form of a thousand headlights blinking
and
it burns.
My hands fidget.
You call me out and it sounds like my brain not being able to hold itself still, I can't,
I can't stop fidgeting under those blue-green eyes.
When you tell me you love me my fingers stay still.
When I think it's loud like nerve endings screaming at me god-**** react like
controlling hands, interconnecting veins jumping from wrists,
hazy.
The stuff of nightmares where you say I don’t trust you
but I know that your hands on my wrists would not,
do not,
burn
like that.
I will tell you when I see you
I will not wrap you in chicken wire.
I am writing to tell you that when you speak my hands stay still.
I am trying to say that nothing snaps and my head is
quiet.

"So. Why a robin?"
I picture us fighting, my neck hits the back of the leather arm chair. It hurts and you apologise. You are still pretending to get mad whenever I say I love you like you are not willing to hear it. You know I am going far away and whether its university or life we can't work without one of us making the other miserable. And I am still folding our hands to origami swans at 3am wishing for a second more with you. It goes futher than taking the scenic route home, dragging my feet and prolonging the front door, pretending we don't know how this ends.  We have the same conversations over and over, you apologising and joking as you think about what you'll turn into//me wondering if I'll even bother to make it that far. One day you might not remember my name, think my face isn't mine because didn't I used to blonde? We are not even perfect on paper. The government wouldn't grant us our bursary because they knew we are too self destructive. My poems for you were pretty when flipped to the ceiling but we think too much, wound ourselves up, and the folds in the pages won't come loose anymore. The words don't sit right. Somewhere on a fence in Carlton sits two robins. And life gets so hard when you realise you can't actually help another adult with their problems, you can only make them a cup of tea. Not coffee. Their brain spins in it's swivel office chair, controls broken. A dictatorship sinking fast. Their heart races - the more coffee you drink the more likely you are to experience anxiety//undiagnosed depression is hard to get rid of, it knows you want to acknowledge it and it waits for you to stumble upon it, it feigns surprises behind a pinewood door, but life doesn't get much better after you notice it. You still want to die and you still think every day about the one in three anorexia sufferers that don't make it. How really you don't know what "making it" is. I found a boy that I imagine smells like fire. He has these crazed pinpoint eyes that are not like yours and I don't know what to think anymore. He is an artistic genius and I want to run from my bad dreams into you and I don't know what to think anymore. I don't think anything is real anymore. I think we hit an iceberg. I think my fingers are caught in the ice, splayed hands grasping still like curved talon ends and I don't think I can get lose but it is cold. Think. Your warm hands on my ribcage holding me on an axis. Pedestal. You told me I don't love you last night and it felt like hot wax cooling in my throat. I can still taste it now. My hands are cold. I'm writing poetry about you again but I don't know if it's for you this time. Yes, there's a difference. I felt something gut wrenching today when I found that the great barrier reef had died. Is dying. It lived for 25 million years and the human race killed it. Like a toxic relationship composed of a bad survival climate and corporate waste, like us killing us. Big red buttons looming closer. I would compare us to the death of the great barrier reef- I don't think we were as beautiful, and we were killed by ourselves not climate change. So I am writing us an obituary before we self implode. I am writing the nights I have not spend crying on the kitchen floor an obituary before they are even over.  I don't think I can breathe underwater and the pressures are getting to your head. The colours are fading and the plants aren't breathing anymore. The backs of my eyelids are freezing over. You are the only one who knows about the two robins on a fence somewhere safe. You are the one I tell my nightmares to, the ones where I wake up and I can't breathe without you. The ones that I don't have anymore because now my fingers are inches away from the end of the rabbit hole. I can feel the breeze at my fingertips. We deserved more than a bunch of flowers cellotaped to a lamppost. More than a game of hangman. More than this is how I say happy anniversary. I wish we hadn't killed the great barrier reef. I wish that there had been better ways to say happy anniversary.

Dear god I miss you
and I dance to the blues
feeling sick all the while
my toes are anemic
there’s a frog in my throat
it’s all a bit wrong
and we dance to the blues
two left feet all the while
it doesn’t quite suit us
these bathroom tiles on the floor
the ballroom dancing to the blues
we don’t touch all the while
dear god I miss you
I haven’t seen you in weeks
it’s all a bit wrong
and all a bit blue.

On a day that was shaped a little different,
I was talking to two specs of star-stuff.
Grief was staring at me from her chair in the
corner. I asked them,
        What comes next?
The small one, she smiled quite sadly and
said:
        The most important part,
        but you’ll have to wait and see.
        Mum’s waiting, you’d better go.

If you still loved her you'd tell me about how her nose crinkled when she'd laugh like she could love the entire the world, and how she liked the yellow of sunflowers because they'd remind her of what it was to be healthy; how she was set to be nothing like her parents yet was still fragile enough to breakdown in a hospital bed; her spontaneous singing. What it was like to hold her in your sleep.
You'd tell me how you miss her reaching out for you; how sleeping alone made you worship the summers when you heard her laugh billowing in the wind like her skirts, dancing in the breeze:ablaze.
But time does that sometimes,
You don't love her anymore.

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.

Shut up and go to sleep.
I would give anything
to feel your sleeping body next to mine.

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.

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.

I see you, I think
when I need you most
climbing a bad day,
there you were
the very day after your birthday
robin on a birdfeeder
all will be okay.

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.

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.

Your small face smiles at me from
across the dining room
a dining room with a bed
the bed doesn’t have a frame and your blonde fringe
is
gone
too
cut off
when it started to fall out
I didn’t say the image fit
these days you can hardly move
and I forget for a second my own
losses
I only think of what’s coming
an inhale is stubbing my sternum on fibreglass
while it’s reinforcing some concrete
it’s all the same
I try to hold the past a little tighter

I felt it then
nothing
at first
and then all of a sudden in a burst
an itch
on the roof of my mouth
when I close it
something persistently
ingrown
it catches on a button a crease
a similar in relation smile
and then it is my turn
I smile and tell you
“I’m sorry”
you smile at me like you’re sorry
that I’ve come back to see this.

THE PIANO KEYS. KEEP STEPPING. ON MY TOES. THEY DO IT WITH A LOW, GRAVELLY, DOMESTIC APPLIANCE VOICE LIKE THE DAY I CAUGHT YOU DANCING. DANCING SO BEAUTIFULLY. IN THE VIOLET ROOM WITH THE SHAGGY. DRUNKEN. HOOVER. OH. ONE-EYED CARPET FACE I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING. I SWEAR MY TINNITUS IS ACTING UP. THE ROOM HASN’T STOPPED RINGING SINCE YOU OPENED YOUR MOUTH THE FIRST TIME. WHAT AN UPSIDE-DOWN BLUES CLUB I WALKED INTO. I ORDER A DRINK FROM THE SINK. IT TOLD ME STRAIGHT OUT TO **** RIGHT OFF. I THINK I JUST LOST ITS NOTEBOOK. THE ROOM OF BACKWARDNESS. OUTWARD. HANDS. THUMBS. I THINK I MEAN. PLEASE DEAR GOD. STOP CROONING. SIGHS THE RUG. TIRED OF STEVEN. STEVEN DOESN’T KNOW EITHER. ANYTHING. NOT EVEN. ABOUT THE CARPET.

(I wrote you most days from the rainforest floor)
                                                                              This is where the                       
moss was                                                           
  ­                                                                 ­         
                                       and they were too

I am out of touch and missing all at once                                 unable to get back to the surface
swimming next to a blue flame
glowing ectoplasm glitters
the tour guide is a woman’s voice       under the stars and everything concave is inside out     far away from what it once was,
                                                            ­                              uninverted
happy is the uncertain                     I looked for you in the chrysalis       and you
                                                             ­                  were still wearing
                                                         ­                                 your socks
                                                           ­      
when you disappeared
I found them in my drawer three days later      tucked themselves in still covered in glitter from the caves
I had so many questions when I reached out my hands
stuck to the walls and swallowed my palm
                                                            ­  silicone and retreating light
it wanted me to stay in a time I could only help but leave
the artists gold leafed my throat like it was delicate and
ready to go on stage                                           wearing shoe covers walking and talking       gently avoiding          swimming their arms the foxgloves developed negatives backwards                                in gelatine                                                         ­                 over water
pasted down                         every darkness bright green lime green stinging                                                         ­  immediately
                                                                ­                             nauseous turning to stone                                      under the gaze of the walls.