So tonight I thought of you,
I thought about the feeling of staring into your eyes, the way they're often staring back at mine.
I thought about the way you wear your smile & how sweet the sound of your laugh sounds.

Somehow you've managed to sneak past the cracks & laid rest in my head.
A place now long closed off & too dark for visitors.
& somehow I couldn't stop smiling,
realising that you were the influence,
giving me reason,
reason to be less afraid.

I guess it's the way you shut off the world as you fixate yourself in the books you read,
the way your body curls up into mine because you don't like it when movie scenes get too intense,
how smooth your hands feel as they trace over my skin, or your soft lips when I press them against mine.

I feel a part of you pouring out of me in all these lines,
I feel you staring at me when I close my eyes.


You've managed to replace my drunken weekends,
reminding me that there was more to life than staring into an empty beer glass.
Thank you.
I'm falling for you,
I wish you knew, but I guess this is why you're reading this.
You often tell me I'm quite,
but here are all my unspoken words for all  the times you caught me staring at you
'cause I sit next to you, rendered speechless,
Wondering where the smooth talker went to.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news baby
but I was broken a long time ago.
I had hoped
when I showed you that video
on kintsugi, the Japanese art
of repairing broken pottery
with lacquer and powered gold
that you would've seen our history
was not meant to be hidden,
that our imperfections,
the cracks in our ceramics
were meant to be illuminated
with gold

a hybrid soul,
one to blend like watercolour
paintworks into the social canvas,
boys would stare,
at the star, gone dying, who knew
spotlights illuminate
the pretty parts,
the hips and the mannequin calves.
until the sun dimmers, like gods
dipped lantern burnt out,
and bodies are stripped like birds
of their feathers, plucked to glaring
scars and worn out faces peer
into the mirror - who is the ugliest
of them all.

they called her by names,
prettier than her own,
until she trembled into the
valley of the dolls, a dark and dismal
place with discarded arms and legs,
to build the perfect 'woman' -
a vulnerable creature, made to
be loved, to be wanted.

In this story,

she’s made of only blood, flesh, and bone. Her pair of
white-hot eyes trail down polycarbonate
bodies like liquor over skin, yes, I’m moving to
New York next weekend. Yes, I’m very excited. She’s a
simmering bowl of office clerk and
caesius veins, swimming, always swimming.

It’s not like she has a lot of *** or anything, though she
likes bodies against bodies and the smell of
salt and sweat and gasps and heaves and
the thrill. 40s jazz and pill-shaped
freckles; she pulls her sweater down over her hands,
tries to calm down a heart that'll never stop
beating.

God. Yes. Yes to whiskey, yes to the new car, yes to falling
asleep without eating dinner. It’s about the new, the news, the
ivy and the flowers and the way that roses are so beautiful and yet they are
covered in thorns and green is a very pretty color until
jealousy turns everything brown and rotten and it’s all about the

way Venus fly traps are so wonderful and so so cruel.

In the past five years, you haven’t
stepped foot into a hospital. Unlike your best friend,
whose father had cancer, and unlike your grandmother,
who slipped and fell and broke her hip and
you were vacationing in Ecuador when all of this was happening,
unable to escape from the tropical rainforests to visit
the sick and dying.

Your friends tell you that you’re lucky,
that they’ve been to hospitals twelve times since their birth,
but at this point, anything would be more exciting than
coming home and falling asleep. Even your favorite TV show
can’t keep you awake anymore, and instead of being in surgery
or giving birth,
you curve your spine into a C shape while trying to finish homework
that will never truly be done.

But if you really cared about any of this, maybe you
would drive to the hospital, take a stroll down the maternity ward,
though suddenly you’d remember
that you don’t know how to drive
and maybe you’ll never get out of this place,
maybe this is all there will ever be.

one time, when you were six years old,
your parents took you to the alligator farm,
which is exactly three.02 miles away from the beach, and
your father, with his beefy hands, lifted you up in his arms,
let you peer over the safety railing at the scaly green creatures
below you, and sometimes now you wish he would have
dropped you down. maybe you would have died. or maybe
you wouldn't have, but at least then you would’ve had
a survival story to tell.

perhaps the problem with
starting poems off with a trip to the alligator farm is that readers
expect you to get chopped into sixteen pieces by means of
teeth larger than hands, break your neck, but
there’s no conclusion to this story other than that sometimes
you wash your hands until your knuckles are bleeding,
and that’s by far worse than being swallowed by a reptile,
clawing out your own vocal chords,
dying,

bring me in
brutal honesty
I want to feel you fingertips
all over me and under me.

make my hair come undone,
true intentions
my clothes all on your ground.

breathless
and mesmerized
I want small things about you
to become big things in this world of mine.

the way you taste
and the sounds you bring forth,
it won't go unremembered the reason
we're here for.