I don’t want to measure this in words
I don’t want to explain or understand
I have been breathing in pure chaos
and there is no oxygen in it

I am dizzy with it

my insides, my outside
my life, my mind
we are tangled Christmas lights

a Gordian knot
but the knife never cuts deep enough

I self medicate with distraction
I drink too much
I think too much
but always end up here
with the bottle too empty
and my head too full
and I don’t have the energy that this desperation needs

I should feel more than this
but as a legacy from you
it fits

empathy and anger are concepts to me
puzzle pieces I try to fit in the hollow inside me
but they do not feel like mine

you do not feel like mine

and the truth of that is jagged
rough and corrosive
because it has more flesh to it than anything else between us

but emotion is hereditary
I must give to mine what you gave to me
and I am empty handed

but not empty
which counts for nothing when all I feel is locked inside me
wrapped up in words and handed to strangers
who cannot understand the weight of them

and now my children bleed
from wounds no mother should inflict
and I watch their pain and I am
frozen

because I have no language for this

and I realise that maybe this was your truth
that this was all you had to give me
but not all you had

so maybe this empathy and anger I hold is yours

but emotion is hereditary
and I do not want these words to be rewritten
by those I love the most
so I will learn to give my words to those who need them

because I do not want emptiness to be my legacy

I wish I could draw
with soft dark lines on perfect white
I would sketch a woman
sitting in a tub
knees tight beneath chin
hands unclear

she would be nothing but an outline
stark and vulnerable
colourless

then with gentle flickers
of stop-gap movement you would see the blade

not menacing or sinister
a scalpel
and my simply drawn woman
would ease the blade into her side
and you would see that there is no destruction in her intent

this is to cleanse

and I would bring the image close,
so you could see the gentle weeping wound
watch toxicity leaking from her flesh
and it would make sense to both of us

since times of leechings we have understood the dangers of letting ugliness fester inside our skin

but then we would step back
as the bath around my woman filled
red and toxic green
the simple lines of her submerged slowly by the ugliness from within

and you would look at my pictures then
and understand my meaning
that sometimes poison cannot be cut out
that you cannot give clean skin to someone made of scar tissue

i cannot touch the world skin to skin
i am not built to withstand such intimacy
the violent burn of it takes my breath and makes my hands shake

and yet, I am touch starved
hungry for skin privileges

so instead I touch by proxy
I dress my love and care in pragmatic gestures
I reach inside and pick out the raw elements of who I am
and pin them to the page with words

I hand the world rows of text and hope someone will notice me between the lines

And then I run back to the shadows and hide
because that is me there
naked and exposed
and my hands shake
because real intimacy must reciprocate
and I have no language for it.

standing side by side we are a Venn Diagram
the only point of overlap our need

we call it friendship
but it is corrupted
moulded through necessity
and lack of choice

the need came first
who was just an afterthought

we are rent-a-crowd
rhubarb, rhubarb white noise
in the silent spaces of each other’s lives
props to distract the eye from empty chairs

it is greed and empathy in equal measure
we see each other in third person
both broken, complicated and difficult

but I see all the shades of you
I see your greens and browns and harsh yellow

You are tiger’s eye and opal
Not to my taste, but beautiful

I am rough quartz
unremarkable but solid

you want a dance partner
someone to sing with
I fold your laundry and water your plants

you have derailed me
you handed me flickering pictures of
sentiment and golden innocence
and now I am wrecked

sliced open
watching myself bleed with indifference

I cannot shape this wound with metaphor
It is too vast to fix that way
And I cannot see the reasons why I should from here

so now I am stumbling in the vaulted rooms of my past
with my eyes grimly shut
fighting off the smell and sound of it

but the flavour of my own inadequacy sours my breath
and pills and wine and darkness
will not remove the taste

Head and shoulders back.
Staring down the world over the bridge of your nose.

That’s the why of it;
you are framing the vista with your own experience
inserting yourself into the centre of every landscape you admire

I however, fold inwards
Protecting myself from a violation you don’t even believe in.

You are crushing flowers into the sidewalk.
i am desperately avoiding standing on the cracks