I have studied **** Germany
Someone stood and preached to me
All the ‘important’ names
All the ‘important’ dates
I wrote them down like longshore secrets
And debated over them
Like they were the pencil sharpenings
With which I littered the floor
‘Excellent analysis’ she said
I have even stood by the gas chambers
And the gallows
At Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
And written insensitive poetry about insensitivity
But have I heard of Hans Litten?
Of course I haven’t.
I have stood in the Berlin gestapo office
And formed philosophies that feel more like profanities
Wondering how it can ever be appropriate
To take a school trip to a genocide
But tonight my ‘important’ education
Feels like the greatest atrocity
My guilty ignorance beats almost unbearably
Around my rib-cage
And waits for the shatter and the shards
Because I have never heard of Hans Litten
We all know six million
But who knows the six million?
We remember names that we stored away
Because mentioning them in an essay
Might bring about a higher grade
Displaying ‘a highly developed and complex level of understanding’
We remember names like we remember shopping lists
Or science lessons;
A few particular points
No attachment necessary
In fact, clinical detachment is far more becoming
When it comes to essay questions
They never told us about Hans Litten
Or about the men who also ran in the race to be in history books
Or about their mothers
And their fathers
And the people they shared cells with
And the people they shared graves with
My God, they never told us about Hans Litten
And Hans Litten is better known
Than most of those phantom dead
Those cracked-open voices that dared to raise
Until they were too loud for anything but the conveyer-belt
Concentration Camp system.
And the thing is that six million is not such a big number anymore
Because there are 49,506,514 views of Simon Cowell crying
And nearly 300 million of One Direction singing a song which is not so beautiful after all
And people are so desensitized to the number six million
That they believe that the world
Would not have enough **** in it
Without them posting hatred after obscenity after hatred in the YouTube comments
And Hans Litten, I can’t help feeling that I’ve failed you
My generation could tell you the private lives of their idols
But would not know your name
And we will still pour into school on Monday morning
And chorus our tireless fatigue and our lack of motivation for life
And I will still pour into school on Monday morning
And let myself complain and moan and grapple for sympathy.
I’ve acquired this abstracted self-loathing recently
That is less a hatred of myself than a hatred of what I have made of myself
Of my ingratitude and self-centred inability
To compose poems that do not start and end with Me
And of my procrastination and my ceaseless desire
To live something other than the life I’ve been given
Like I asked for extra cheese and got given Margharita
****.
I’m insufferable.
Hans Litten your list of injuries was ten times longer
than the list of all the wrongs I’ve had done against me.

A crumpled paper heart
beats in the corner of
her paper soul.

The best days
Are not the Best Days
Or even the good days
They are the unremarkable
Inconsequential
Days
When you take a step away from yourself
And observe the rise and fall of a moment
From beyond its swell
When you are driving fast
Through a slow-moving night
And the headlights are smearing themselves on the roads
Like they’re trying to redecorate
And the radio is singing Yellow
And you turn your head out the window
To find a moon hung there
Blue-tacked to the infinity of sky
As thick and yellow as your grandmother’s smile
Or when it is winter and the sun has set
But the world doesn’t want the day to be over
And so pulls a musty, mustardy-grey blanket
Right up to its neck and prays
That the time for streetlights
Will insist on running ahead of it
Or when the shadows grow long in summer
And they fall like dust on the sand dunes
You run down to the sea
And try to hold it in your hands
Until the tide prises it from your clenching fingertips
Or when the sunrise is pink
And the cloud caps skid
Like ice-creams on hot plates
And you can’t help but bask in
The creativity of God
The painter
Who’s masterpiece could simply not be framed
And hung on your kitchen wall
And for a little while you want to be able
To lick the colours and candyfloss
Until someone says that little rhyme
About red sky in the mornings
And a shepherd’s warning.

I'm okay, she says as she slices her wrist
I'm fine, she murmurs in between gulps of bleach  
I've never been happier*, she whispers as the light fades from her eyes

I don't know how to talk to you without crying
I don't know how to ignore you without dying

If
One
More
Person
Tells
Me
To
"Stay Strong"

*I'MGONNAFUCKINGTHROWSOMETHINGLARGEANDHEAVY