I like to watch a plea compile between the furrow of a brow,
like the indents of age that shot across the forehead of Odysseus
as he stood before his father and asked:
This place I've reached, is it truly Ithaca?
On the face of Laertes' child,
longing stung like a bolt from Zeus
wishing to belong within a home once overrun by memory,
now ruled by the shell of a war-torn son.

I see this look as your body drapes over mine,
skin honeyed with pleasure and fatigue.
Your eyes darken into a question you never ask,
tracing the remnants of the pain I felt a year or so ago
scarred into skin sweet only to your touch.
It does not take a sword to wound, and the mind can feel the blood-thirst of a thousand men.

Frequently, I have felt akin to the battleground of Troy,
not the warriors themselves, but the soil beneath their feet
the ground that saw hope die with the sting of metal.
I would be a fool to believe the war does not silently wage on, years after the last sight of a blade.
We lie side by side, and I will try to not disturb you as I toss and turn,
I reach for you but your body, in its coldness, awaits the pyre I pretend is not there.

In their eternal bed carved from life,
I imagine Penelope
wide-eyed and hungry. As the man she waited for
recalls the one-eyed giants
or that sweet, tempestuous song of the Sirens.
And I wonder how he musters the strength to sail by untouched,
forced each night to face the ones that did not return
and worse; the parts of himself he will never feel again.

did it make you feel
closer
to me?

my breath
caught between you and that broken mattress
the one we flipped and turned
and slept on like kids
pillows at the wrong end
dreams left wandering

in your eyes
there was this surge
a rage
filled with possibility
in the absence of my free will
my body
immovable under you knees
my words
lost
in the ringing of desire
bouncing
back
and forth
defending the sudden deafness
of your senses

you are now
closer to me
whether that was indeed your intention
you trace me
despite purposeful lack of communication
i feel the weight of your breath
and the sting of your torso
when i lay very still
or grasp at my sheets
as the sun rises
occupying the loneliest single bed i've ever known
since that night
when you dictated my fate
and i lay
counting the planes that flew overhead
until it was over

The bravest of us all, was indeed
the queen of Carthage. Who all at once,
became a unity of her own.
A woman alone, drowned by the subtle gust
of pain from her fleeing love
gave her own breath, they say,
to pave a holy lineage.
The sword in her sternum the centre of a compass,
and there blew the stench of her
sacrifice to guide her love further adrift.
In her death, she did not require
the ******* of the son of Rome.
His fate swayed between the coasts
of the Tyrrhenian, but hers - a lovely and furious force,
a collision sharper than the
teeth of Scylla, a riot of the elements.
Dido did not sacrifice
her life for the pilgramage of Aeneas,
the ash that was once her skin
returned to the soil of her city, the vapour
of her spirit entwined within the winds.
And although her very being burnt
in glimpses of orange and red, I like to think
that her soul swam besides the vessel
of her downfall. Not to forever be beside
the man of her enticement,
but to surpass the will of fate
and find herself in the sway of the waves.
I like to think
that as she overtook the man and his crew,
into the open arms of beauty and possibility,
knowing the hope
the adventure
that awaited her,
she knew the power of a city
could not be contained within the shell of a man.

I remember despising myself that afternoon, when we shared five seats between the eight of us and borrowed collective nostalgia off one another. Not as a feeble attempt to cling onto the recklessness of our youth whilst life bared it's ugly teeth to us one by one, but rather an instinctive need to remember who we once were. The naivety of our shared memories held us as willing captives on those bar stools, pulling us so tightly that our knees touched and we did not notice the absence of seats.

I don't want to be able to explain to you why I cannot remember the things I still laugh about with you all. I am engulfed not by your desire to relive these moments, but somber acceptance that you will never feel quite so alive again. In these moments I find myself able to replace my absence of memory with the image of you lost in delirium of somebody else's reminiscence triggering a drunken mistake you thought missing a long time ago. I follow the movement of your eyes from person to person. How I would **** to be your gaze: omniscient of the past and omnipotent of the table.

I am selfish, I think. Sometimes I wish somebody had ever so gently knocked on my skull and whispered: "wake up, you're going to want to see this." But they didn't, and I hold nothing against it aside from the infrequent desire to have really been seen, and not just accounted for.

I wish I was party to your secret history that will only leave our table of eight when relayed as gin-fuelled anecdotes at parties we are no longer too yong to be expected to attend. And you think I was there, I suppose I was. You see no difference between me and your left and right. I live on intrinsically as an accessory to your glory years, but I relish in the hope that mine are yet to begin.

I have no memory of brushing my hair past my ribs, but I catch a glimpse of the person you saw me to be whenever your phone screen lights up. I will always be able to picture seven heads of hair and the crooks of your neck, even though these days you can’t straighten it without a click or two pink tablets on an empty stomach.

I am selfish, I know. I could relay the dilation of seven pairs of pupils when we all first got high together, but I couldn’t tell you what part of me went numb, even though I know you couldn’t feel your left big toe for three whole hours.

But for now we will sit, and I won't immerse myself in my routine of self-deprecation until I am sure that I remember the seven meals that surrounded me tonight. For now we will smile and share this table that could never be too small, and you will unwittingly drown me in a life I could only be living here, now, and every Christmas to come of which I am party to the past, even though I was never really there at all.

I have consistently felt a fraud in describing myself as 'determined', or 'driven'. Not due to any quarrel with my faith of ability or self-esteem; myself and my worth quite frankly stand side by side, in quietly ferocious agreement of what I can and will achieve. But, for the days that I find myself debilitated by this intruder, inhibition, I seem to find it much easier to succumb to a detour I have been prudently avoiding for the sake of progress. It is these days I cling onto during my most self-critical moments. As this invasive oblivion washes over me, I cannot fathom desire or purpose in anything of passing. The built up flecks of dust that quiver in the dim gap of the curtains adjacent to my bed make me sneeze, and act as an unbearable physical reminder of the overwhelming force that has seized any means of motivation. I bathe myself in a self-pitying despair, noticing my reflection in the crisis act of a drama, then turning off the TV before I can take heed of any resolution. Memory infatuates itself with devastation and regards love as a courteous aftermath of guilt. Then comes this hurtling, unapologetic force of liberation; a rush of self-destruction or anger, it doesn't matter, it is energy and it is mine. It's the only emotion I have experienced so far in my life akin to electricity. Poets write about how being loved by another is electric, a wave of newness whenever their skin brushes against yours, becoming real and sincere as it travels through your nervous system and synchronises the flow within your veins to their power source. That is until this surge of hunger rises in my throat, begging for an action. Passivity sinks deep, I come to terms that it will reignite, but for now I find myself enamoured with a need to create; to create beauty in my surroundings. This is the drive and determination I had inadvertently deprived myself of; steered by passion and leaving no trail, because there does not have to be material evidence for progress. It may falter into a wandering delirium, but I cannot describe to you the beauty seeped in knowledge of return.

Your condemnation
of hands around my throat,
swept my consciousness underneath your pillow
and let my body drift arount your word.

On more than one occasion,
I was excited by the attention you gave my worth
and let my achievement dance around your tongue,
my belonging hung off of every word you offered.

Hands behind your back,
you choked the ambition from my throat
and pulled me closer with every tongue that uttered the four syllables of my name,
until they forgot how to fit me into a sentence.

Twice I frayed the knot you tied around my neck and down my back,
and at my strongest, you recalled the crease in my side that made me double over in laughter until it hurt,
and it hurt.

For the best part of what I thought to be my best days,
you forced my head to stay above the water so that you could balance on my shoulders,
and see your world from a pedastal,
while I drowned, and saw it as my only support.

The exploration of womanhood,
viewed by a child, who had failed to birth an heir
and was auctioned amidst a war,
to lay beside the man who Lyrnessus heard before it saw,
and felt, before they felt nothing at all.

Plucked from childhood to motherhood,
failed motherhood, into obedience and slavery,
despised by her husband's mother for the absence of life she yearned to grow.
Then veiled in a soft pearlescent,
that blurred, but did not hide, the reason she survived,
and her brothers and husband did not.

Her barren belly proved a blessing when the girls in tents sprouted kleos from their swollen stomachs,
to carry the son of foreigners, bloodthirsty for their native home.
These girls, they are just girls, brainwashed by glory and trauma,
carry children that will slaughter their brothers of blood,
in the name of a woman seen only as a measurement of egotistic revenge.

And what of Briseis?
Aristos Achaion, they cried.
To them, he will always be: the best of the Greeks,
even after Apollo favours the hand of Paris and forges fate to impale the accidental hamartia.
What is her legacy?

Aristos Achaion, they cry.
As the boy who carries his blood rises from the fire and carries forward after his father's body hit the ground.