Take my hand in yours.

Show me Nocturne: Blue and Gold.
Comment on how the blue of the Thames fading to grey
Reminds you of my sad moods.
Slip in the fact that Whistler was born in the state where I grew up,
And died in the country that you call home.
Make it seem like fate, not coincidence.

Show me Newton.
Talk about Blake’s offense at deism.
Watch the mention of religion skitter past my ears
And right over my head.

Show me Norham Castle, Sunrise.
We’ll squint to make out shapes hidden by sun rays,
But it will only blur more.
We’ll take a few steps back and will see it clearly,
Before strangers obstruct our view.
I’ll comment on how the colours look like that of a child’s nursery.

Show me The Awakening Conscience.
I’ll ask you what you think is happening.
You’ll say that you don’t know.
I’ll point out the absence of a ring on her finger,
A mistress, she was.
She longs for something else.
Annie Miller’s beauty encapsulated in a single painting,
Her own life reflected for a moment.

Show me Beata Beatrix.
I’ll gasp with pleasure,
Recite bits of my favourite Rossetti poems for you to hear.
I’ll tell you the story of Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal,
And though you’ve heard it before,
You listen as though you haven’t.

Show me Ophelia.
Kiss my cheek as I gaze upon it, wide-eyed.
Tell me that I am as fair as Ophelia herself,
And I will smile while I marvel in Lizzie’s grace,
Better depicted by Millais
Than by her own husband.

As we leave
And pass the statue of Millais himself,
We shall embark on our own Shakespearean adventure.
To meet Ophelia’s fate,
Content and unaware of danger
Then drowned all at once,
I pray we refrain.

I've never been much of an artist,
but I will paint a portrait
of kisses on your chest,
if you let me.
Matisse has nothing on
the beauty the comes from
the collision of
my lips and your neck,
your lips and my neck.
We are paintbrush and canvas,
both.
The curvature of your lips
belongs in a museum.
I'm keeping it
for my private collection.
My awe cements me
to the bed.

In an instant and without a word of warning,

A billion years’ worth of existential glue

Dissipated into the ether

As he took a final breath of our sickly air. 

We’ve been struggling ever since.

The misery caused by humanity’s follies 

Exhausted his everlasting grace

In just a few decades;

A blip on the radar of time. 

We have unhinged the universe now;

That is what we do. 


“You have brought this upon yourselves,” he laments.

Heterochromatic eyes glaze over with grief.

“Please,” we beg,

“Come back to us.”


Our fatal flaw:

Never knowing what we had

Until we killed it with our own hands.


A million civilisations in the cosmos

But we were the most desperate.

Even the savior of all

Cannot save us now. 


We loved him as we love our Mother;

Still we turned a blind eye to his sickness,

Still we let her wither away 

When she had nothing left to offer us.

We watch skyscrapers collapse,

Petrol fires blaze,

Holes being torn into skin

With the ease of a pencil through paper.

We plead for his forgiveness,

With a rotting feeling in our stomachs

Telling us he will never come.

The stars shine differently now,

Dimmed by the pollution of city lights,

Yet still we gather to watch for him.

Still we wait for him to fall to Earth again.

They drip down walls,
Melt into asphalt
And seep into the earth,
Unnoticed.
Cities full of similar shapes,
And I will pick them out of the crowd
Every single time.
I do not need to see anything else.
I will always recognise the biggest mistake I ever made.

The world is crumbling around me,
And you want to turn it into poetry.

You won't pick up the phone
Because you don't want to hear my voice.
Baby, my voice is all that's left.
It's the only hope I have,
The only way to make it out alive.
So clueless behind a keyboard, so far away.
If you could see how somber this city is,
How loveless, how grey,
Maybe you'd pick up the phone.

If everything collapses,
I'm going down with it.
God knows you won't lend a hand.

I walk this path alone,
Like I always have,
Only this time
It ends at the lake
And I keep walking.
Maybe I'll find you down there
Among the shipwrecks:
My own Benedict Arnold.

Please pick up the phone.

My therapist told me
To make a *** of coffee or tea
When Anxiety acted up.
She said that just the sensation
Of a warm mug in my hands
Could work wonders.
This room is full of cold cups,
Littering every windowsill
And every dusty bookshelf.

I am not a saviour.
You won’t find absolution
In my arms.
Cowardly hands
Write cowardly words
That you will never read.
My love burned quickly,
Fiercely,
And extinguished itself.
It couldn’t sustain
Its own passion.
There are still echoes of you in my heart
But they’ll fade out
Eventually.
You forget how easily voices are forgotten
When the intimacy is gone.
Secondhand smoke
Still does damage, though.
My breath quivers just as much as yours.
I can’t pull you from the wreck
That I myself am trapped beneath.
There is no winner here.
The stale words on yellowed letters
Hold no depth.
They make better tinder
Than literature.
The angel wings you thought I had
Are nothing more than crow’s feet.
I am not your saviour.

In place of calm, read stirring ocean,
Scylla and Charybdis,
between a rock and a hard place.

In place of comfort, read your body,
transient, missing, on a plane somewhere
in a car somewhere on a boat somewhere
without your phone somewhere
somewhere somewhere somewhere
that is not my apartment or my arms
but somewhere where you smile.
Somewhere where your eyes
finally focus.
In place of sleep, read blood between the floorboards
and moving boxes scattered,
read burst capillaries and a savings jar
full of Washingtons and no idea
what I’m saving for.
In place of stasis, read
one fast move or I’m gone.

This intangible craving
  for something so unattainable
    is little more than a lovely fantasy
      but it'll do for now.
        It goes like this:
Your hair is a whirlwind about your skull
  As the Ayrshire wind batters us.
    Thick sweaters and reluctant smiles.
      Damp wool and lovesick laughter.
A thin sodium layer misted onto our skin,
  Granules of sediment beneath our nails
    And in the fibers of every stitch.
      Thin fingers, exploring uncharted land.
Lukewarm, stale coffee turned cold.
  Cold lips turned warm and wet.
    Secrets whispered, never retold.
      The rain falls down on Scotland's shores
        Again.

coughing up something.
heart, soul, lungs,
i don’t know.
nails bitten down too far.
it hurts to touch you,
it hurts to touch me.
every shape,
every curve,
every inch
feels wrong.
my own skin is a prison
for the ethereal being
i long to be.
i am stuck,
hating myself,
loving you.

I dreamt that I found you by the apple trees in my backyard.
That **** crow, pecking at your flesh.
I woke up and I cried.
I think it was then that I realised my heart no longer belongs to me.

I miss you.
I say it now and I'll say it tomorrow.
I'll repeat it every single day of my life,
And even when you're here or I'm there,
I won't stop missing you.

I walked down the street last Wednesday
And tried to imagine how your hand would feel clasped in mine.
I couldn't.

I'm afraid to sleep because I'm afraid to dream of you.
There is no difference between a dream or a nightmare;
They both make me long for you just the same.

Oh, what have you done to me?

We were all just lost souls trying to see where we fit.
We were looking for a place to settle down,
A place to call home.

We pretended to love one another,
Rallied together against the boringness of the same old town.
With each passing day we had less to talk about.
We resented each other more the longer we were together.
We created drama out of nothing just to ease our psyches.

Half of them got drunk every weekend just to have a story on Monday,
Made **** jokes and then said **** culture doesn't exist.
A few started doing ****** in the woods;
It was cheap, it was easy,  it numbed the chronic loneliness.

I told my best friend that in six months I would never see him again.
He agreed.

We all said we'd get out when we got the chance.
Only a few of us did.

He cradled my heart
Between the lines etched into his youthful palms;
It quivered
And he whispered lullabies to calm it’s ache.
He filled my lungs with the ocean separating us,
A slow, soothing suffocation.
Saltwater desiccated me from the inside out
Until I was perfectly preserved for him.

Five hours too late or
Five hours too early;
He wanted to take me for coffee
In the middle of the night.
I would have walked on water
To know his embrace.

I was a slave to his lilted tongue;
He was a slave to his blood’s desires.
He begged for the release of his own grip.

Like a gust of sea air,
He vanished as quickly as he had arrived
And relinquished his hold on me.

A time zone or two
And an ocean of blue
Keep us from holding our breath.
We’re fire and ice, you and I,
Can’t you see?
Longing for warmth,
Melting too quickly.
My suffering ends
And your depression begins.
My happiness fades
And yours starts anew.
I’m always down
And you’re always up,
Or it’s the other way ‘round.

But I’m still so in love with you.

If you can sleep at night
With your past behind you
And your future ahead,
What is left to dream about?

I brewed a *** of coffee
And drank it all
In half-hour intervals
Beginning at 9pm
And ending at 10:30.
It was just enough
To keep me from sleeping;
To keep me from dreaming about you.

come back
come back
come back
prove to me that there is something here worth fighting for

i've lost count of the days without you
seasons change without you
we've all got something that we're fighting for
it was only ever you

lips stained with pomegranate juice,
i want to kiss every inch of you;
temporary tattoos to remind you of me.

Please forgive me, for my hands won’t stop shaking.
You and I:
Parallel lines holding on to the notion that maybe one day
We’ll intersect, in more ways than one.
My breath catches at the thought of your fingertips
Slipping and sloping down my spine.
I can’t fall asleep anymore without you on my mind,
Conjuring images of your
Phantom arms wrapped around my waist
And the autumn breeze of an open window washing over me.
They say that this cannot be love,
But god, I’m not so sure.

Your mother doesn’t know that I exist.
I thank her every morning for you,
Over my lukewarm cup of cheap coffee.
She is the only person who will ever love you more than I.
You look at me like I am made of flowers
Whose petals have colours you’ve never been able to comprehend.
I hope they make a little more sense now.

The first wrinkles on my face will be crow’s feet,
Like my mother’s,
Like my grandmother’s.
We’ve all fallen a little too hard
And smiled a little too much.
I’ll cherish them just the same.

They never taught us how to write poems without the fuel of heartache.
I’ll never learn, anyhow.

I’ve known a handful of ethereal people,
And I’ve watched them all walk away
Into another light, into their own worlds.

They were dreams with crooked teeth

And carefree wisdom in their palms.

They had me placing my heart at their feet,
And just laughed and kissed my cheek
With eternal lips.

Now that I’ve had a tiny taste,
How can you expect me to be satisfied
With this lackluster life
And these lackluster people?

My cup runneth over with the most imperceptible despair.
A heart that weeps bitterly for itself,
For the futility and desperation of its existence:
To love, to love, to love,
For naught.

Churning and rattling within;
If only I could ***** up this feeling
To rid myself of it.
No, it grows steadily,
A sickness as deep as the Thames,
The banks of which he wanders
Aimlessly, searching the ripples
For life.

There is no way to drain love from oneself.
If I possessed the will, I would bleed myself dry.
There would be more relief there
Than in the insufferable nature of distance
And the anguish of flesh not kissed.

Pulsating track lights.
Resonation.
Sunlight trickling down my neck as it set,
following the same pattern as your fingertips
that afternoon in your kitchen,
dripping like morning sweat.
When there was nothing left to say,
we filled the silences.

I adored your friends before I knew you,
yet my gaze drifted
to your shadow
as you stood behind a sheer black curtain;

no bigger than a toy soldier in my periphery
but I'd already memorised your shape.
I'd know you anywhere.

Sixteen thousand other people saw you,
but none like me.
She asked why I was blushing.

I had no explanation for the way my heart raced
as I remembered whose body I would sleep next to that night.
There you were,
in my sightline,
and yet I ached for you.

You should come with a warning label.
Caution: Will break your heart
And make you question everything.

The wickedness of fallible love
Is a lesson I will never learn.
I should’ve seen you coming.

It is so difficult to love someone new
When the last hands that held me
Were yours.
I didn’t know you cross your fingers
Before making promises.
I never did.
Not with you.  

There are no duck-and-cover practices;
Stop, drop, and roll doesn’t work
When your heart is on fire
And the smoke is suffocating.
Not everyone survives this day.

my heart is beating out of my chest.
i am lonely but in love.
i have no hands to hold nor lips to kiss
and yet i rejoice in an empty bed.
i long for him, an ocean away,
and yet too far from my thoughts.
two years and a decade too late.
i crave the solitude of an irish cottage,
thought i cannot help myself in wondering
if i’d be happier with him there.

I can’t come crawling back
With the skinned-up knees of a child.
You are the bicycle I’ve forgotten how to ride.
Can’t you see how dangerous you’ve become?

My heart has grown too big for the space I’ve allotted it.
You take up too much room.
It thrashes and throbs against its cage,
Enraged, defeated, sobbing.

You’re always so far away from us.

I can’t drag myself away from this hell.
Fifteen years has worn my joints to dust.
The sea air stings.
I need summer grass and chamomile tea in the sunshine.
Can you give it to me?

Don’t let me take your hand.
Don’t let me kiss the nape of your neck, the curve of your lips.
Don’t let me fade into you.
I’ll never be wholly myself ever again.

Three years disappear so quickly.
Just one thought can send my heart
Back to that day, back to that room
With the black curtains.
It races and I still don’t know why.
Your hands on my waist, my shoulders, my back.
Your lips so close but not close enough.
A cotton shirt reeking of cigarette smoke
And regret. (I’ve always hated smoking,
But I still wanted to breathe you in.)
There was something familiar
About the way you said my name.
I was a child, just a child,
And you were an animal
With a crooked grin and my love at your feet.
Three years,
And I still insist on making something
Out of nothing.