My children will be free like stones over calm lakes
They will drown under the weight of their own burdens
Home will be the hands of the person paying the rent of whatever we live in
Food will be the cans they manage to steal from the grocery store
Hearts beating like butterflies
They will grin at themselves when they make it out unscathed, proud and boastful,
grown-ups before puberty
They will take care of each other
It will always be them
They will learn that family means never giving up, never letting go, always supporting with whatever we have left to give
They will have a poet for a mother
This means that words will be the wombs from which they were born
Sadness will run through their veins
Their eyes will be lined paper, their smiles pens, their bodies a culmination of grief and love
They will be neglected, second best, always clamouring after filled notebooks
They will be stones
Thrown over lakes in a game
Sinking
Drowning

It's hard to teach myself things sometimes
I repeat the lessons as if I were in primary school again, memorising times-tables without success, willing the numbers to form in my mind
I know I should love myself enough to get away from you,
In simplest terms, talking to you makes me hungry for more
I don't want casual banter, I want your palms to my lips and your legs wrapped around me
I want intimacy like the kind I've always been scared of, to look into your eyes without shame or fear
But I do fear
Because you don't want the same
You don't want me the way I want you, you want to unhinge my mind and let loose the secrets, to eat them like snacks
There is something wrong with you and I could help diagnose it
god knows I do it for all my friends
But you call me crazy and you make me feel hard to love and that bruises me from the inside out. I am a walking wound
I have loved others like you
People who have whittled me down into toothpicks to use once and throw away
I have let go of a lot of people like you, who make feel like I'm always dressed inappropriately even when I'm naked
But I can't learn from my mistakes
My love for you is a monster inside my chest
shrieking and clawing at you
Desperate and delusional
I know this is all going to blow up in my face but I'm going to enjoy this moment right now
when you told me you loved me for the first time

I am fragile
a glass bead on your necklace
you promised me you would never grow bored of me
could never grow bored of me
I was fascinating, a glint of light on a raindrop trailing down your window

you treated me like a goldfish,
beautiful, delicate,
watched me swim through water
But you stuffed me with broken promises, you gave me hope like a light in my heart and stole it away and now I'm blind

I'm blind to all but your face
My heart skips along to yours
You know that emptiness attracts me like a disease
you groomed me like a vaccine
You left me
You grew bored, and there's a part of me that's happy because I knew you would
I wanted to prove you wrong

If you just gave me the chance
I would turn you into poetry,
make literature out of you,
you would not be
a chapter in my life
You would be the whole book
Consumed in passion
Read like a tear-jerker in bed
with the rain
Tapping on the window outside
We would love like pages of a story
Flowing into each other

I can't trace my ancestors
Find my blood back to where it came from
Fires stole the documents, ate the house, burnt the mother, took a child
I would have a bigger family probably
The boats took a man
Lost a wife
mixed the blood into something unwanted by the country I was born into
Impure they declared
I am impure they declared
My father and mother, degenerates, traitors to their blood
I can't name my family
My surname isn't real
Made up to avoid persecution by a government who saw us as animals
I am not real
There is silence in my blood
Shame in my veins
We need new names but we can't seem to find them
There is no history in our books
No stories of our pasts
We have no roots
Plants waving in the wind
No home to call our own

As a child I learnt that there is an international signal for
help me
save me
get me out of here
And I played my hands waving and high like a broken robot asking the sun and moon to save my soul
They didn't listen
And I have since spent the years inventing new signals to get your attention
Broken twisted gestures intended for shock and abhorrence
delicate hands, crouched fingers, a thumb in a field of wheat
honest
honest
why don't you see me
Why can't you save me
There is supposed to be an internationally recognised signal for
"Help"
So why is the world blind to my troubles
when I throw myself into water and wave at the sky

intense
intense
be intense
start fires
be waves and drown us all
be fiery and consume
intensify
don't pacify
yourself or others
be passion
be flames and the sun
be the moon
cause shifts of blood with gravity's rule
rule the sea and capsize
hearts and ships and stereotypes
be a queen and chop off their heads
dragon tongues and fluttering wings
ruin the ruins and break the buildings
cut the earth in half
roar