NO.
Two ruby marks.
I can feel them bloated against my hand.
Like glue or blood.
Meat, metaphorical and incarnate.

Not that. It means nothing to me.
The milky light falls upon it as
I catch it from the corner of my own milky lense.
No.

The first and eternal struggle,
And still I march on and pray
It doesn't end.

Your cold print is
Solidified in ink.
Black or blue?

Indelible, your death-
Grip upon me paralyses my pen.
Irretrievable, unreliable us.

Numbness blots out positivity and
My uncertainty dries bright.

Today I'm feeling full.
Full of love?
Full of ****.
Full of blood.

That's it.

Pounding through bloated veins.
Pounding red, and blue and through
A jerking spectrum of shades.

Glinting bright through its fragile cage,
Colouring my moonlight skin.
Colouring my thoughts full in.

I finished a book

Today, captive on a summer coach of corporeal ghosts,
All desperate to free their cramped limbs
Brought on by this sweltering perpetuity of moving and yet

Staying dead still.

And me?
I am the least tangible of them all.
An entire being lost
In the flesh and blood of these characters that I know
Better than myself.

Their lives are
Succinct
Chapters.
Beginning,
Middle,
End.

If only I could follow such narration,
Break from one turgid existence and the
Personal purgatory of my sentence:

The M11: Manchester to London

Here. There. Is no beginning or end but
Instead two places where my faltering roots
Cannot grasp onto something more...
Solid.

But as the bus trails to a halt,
I turn the last leaf.
Flesh and blood evaporate in a flash of

The end.

I

We are all soldiers.

But don't expect political rallies.
"The streets are ours!"
Some other clichéd call to arms.

Not from me.

II

My battles are taking place in unsaid words.
In silent, sniffled phone calls.
War is inevitable, "It had to happen someday"
"No, it ******* didn't!"
Protests a long haired boy.

III

You don't have to have an enemy to be a prisoner of war.
My own silence has us chained together,
And our cold handcuffs have left my wrists sore.

It's clear to me, that as we are
Both of us are doomed to starve.
I try to cover your eyes and ease the shock,
But the time will come for mercy killing
And I will always be the villain.

You spell 'sadness' starting with the letter 's'
Pushed hard against the period of your bedside wall.

I spell 'comfort' with the 'o' of my hands and the 'm' of my *******.
My starting script on your paper back.

We speak and spell 'love'.
We laugh and we hug.
Our bodies 'l' and our arms 'v'.

You roughly rub out our careful pencil spellings,
Our sonnet frayed by a silent caesura.

Watching documentaries about your trendy bands.
The 'Creative Process'. My shaking hands.

I'm inspiration and envy and my own constant shame
Because I'm still Lost to Larsson but by a new name.

I find meaning in nothing and nothing is mine.
I find meaning in water, in four inked red lines.
I fixate and form cycles, I'm Beckett's star act.

I make all these references, I muddle all that.

I'm an artist, I read, these aren't my own thoughts.
I'm not troubled, just open,
And I'm not really lost.

So what can I believe in? Hell, what can anyone?
**** God. **** 'The Classics'

I'll believe in being young.

"You're as simple as the sea"
I said, and I mean it now.

From afar you are beautiful, well,
Picturesque. An outstretching body of calm.
Shades of blue and inky depths, well,
Hidden from view, but none the less.

This romantic view drew me to you, but I forgot
The stormy days

Out at sea. It screams blue and green,
It engulfs me. It breaks against my little boat,
Rips, drifts, washes away any hope that I have left
Of surviving long enough to see these shifting waters
Tinged angry red, as the sun rises over us
In your single bed.

Black empty words create
Grey empty pages.

When you scribble-speak;
Colours spark from your tongue,
Heavy from your lips,
Bitter from the back of your throat.

But there's never enough yellow.

My colours muddle and dull and fade and leave nothing.
Just grey empty promises.