They gave me Xanax,
you got ******.
You say meditation helps.

I want to keep you under my shirt—
cradle you in my arms
against the skin of my belly.

We could give this a go.
Eat cold pizza,
have *** with unshaved legs

get sloppy drunk and confess
how ****** in the head
we are. You made me feel

a feel. Patched up a gaping,
numb and empty
hole I didn't realise I was missing.

This past year has been so empty.
I’ve been trying to fill the space
you left

with glamorous friends, rich men
drugs and adventure.
It could have worked. It might have.

You turn up, nothing’s changed.
Same smile, same wicked laugh,
same freckled skin.

Rest your head on mine
and suddenly I’m whole again.
Frantic kissing like

trying to lick out the last drops
of medicine.
Who knows how long you’ll be gone for this time.

I remember your first name,
your county,
I remember the way your words slurred,
tripping

over themselves, how you stared -
watching confetti melt
as it floated in fractals.

Passing instances.
I wonder do you remember
how I sat on your shoulders,
or how did we meet? In that field

I drank too much, the music
was loud and the air
packed with hazy heat.

You painted a picture for me.
A landscape of lives briefly
intertwined and a future
so clear I could see it.

Our phones were dead. You said
“I should find my friends.”
and then you were gone forever.

My mother first wrote it
on my birth cert
by street name, by nature.

“You shouldn’t do that,
you’re no race horse.”
Then why am I running, running

perpetually
carrying little men who kick me.
Filling the hole won’t fill me.

If I eat sugar, orange candy
and lots of honey
I won’t hear the boys be mean to me.

I'm leaving
the city that made me.
This city that smells

like a peach after rain.
It's full of junkies,
no one cares about the homeless

forever camped out, cursing
bankers earning six figure profits
still living with roommates.

Out of it again on the Ha'penney.
Watching the sun rise and wondering
how you could ever

live in a place that isn't
this filthy, this guilty,
this beautiful and pure.

This riddled with history.
With bullet wounded buildings
painting memories of not-quite-war.

Wide streets, tall terraced houses
pale era, ***** all over rural Ireland
yet still feels like home.

And you go and you go and you go.
Music bubbles up through cracks in the road.
I'm looking for a place where my womb

is my own.
I love you like a babby loves an alcoholic mammy.
Dublin, I love you to the bone.

Soothing, mothering hand of a soft day
smooths away a wrinkle in my head
pressed there by the grimace of constant self-reflection.

The warm rain offers me solace, the grey
sky seeks to calm and I notice now for the first time
the leaves unfurled and the dandelions ticking.

A coffee and a glass of water, a cigarette
and some poor-man’s lunch shape my day
until another slips away into the furnace.

I’m seeking affirmation. I keep asking:
“do you think I’m coming off the rails -
Or was I always running off the sleepers?”

It’s met with a **** of the head, usually,
or a ‘hmm… you’re great fun though’.
I know but that’s not what I’m asking.

I was a mess
when you left. You made
a mute of me with absent goodbyes,
bored morning niceties.
Glued my eyes
shut together with slobbering drunk
‘Seen 2:41AM’
regretful mixed messages.

I see you, when you’re ***-in-hand,
wincing on the words,
tip-toed, nose-to-the-floor,
trying to spit out the fact that
you’re miserable.
Amnesiac
on a whim with a foggy gut feeling
I could be worth telling.

I’m listening
to the things you’re not saying.
The silence much more silent.
I would have looked after you.
I still want to, but now I'm
forever perched on the edge of the bed,
touching boys and feeling nothing,
and seeing boys and feeling nothing,
and seeing boys and seeing nothing,
and seeing boys and seeing
boys and seeing boys and feeling nothing.