I was high when the call came.
Beer and pills
and too much green.
I was wasted when the call came.

The cheer struck up like a match caught flame
went up like a firework
from all these boys I barely knew
and they lit a J to celebrate.

Ninety-seventh percentile.
I could have just
drunk
my way into medical college.

It's the eyeroll,
the "yeah, do what you want"
from trying to please them all at once.
It's the "***** sake"
the "yeah okay"
that makes me
cry myself to sleep for days.
It's the I-am-so-*******-worthless
like a broken record playing
on repeat
it's the please-don't-hate-me
please-don't-forget-me
that never works, it never works.

Who the **** was I?
And who the **** am I?
In a tree, on a limb, suspended
on the thin green twig
upended
from the hands of the old gods,
let fall to smack
every fat
branch on the way down.
Penniless and unpretty,
useless and sometimes silly,
sometimes a little bit clever,
sometimes a listener
sometimes performs well,
tricks, no old dog, new *****,
forgotten in the bottom drawer
every seam of that old life unpicked
everything we stitched
torn up, cut up, ripped.

Pie eyed, pout mouth
butterfly wings all crushed
a little girl's hand squeezed shut—
Who are you now? Mascaraed
to the death, to the death.
A young white girl slung on a pole,
a princess hung by the neck,
mannequin?
Who is your puppeteer,
does he beat you black and blue?
Does he do that to you?
Does he tell you he loves you like I do?

The female temple.
Hollow shell in the minds of men.
An autoclave
for a belly, a copy-and-paste mind
of blasphemies. A page
in man's contradictive bible. Just blondes and brunettes.
Just virgins and non-virgins.
Nothing more than breathing incubators.
I am a person, I have a brain, I say.
They smile at me with a condescending
wink. A nod. Good girl, well done.
They tousle my hair. Well fine, boys.
Watch me climb the ladder with one hand,
backwards, in heels. When I reach the top
I'll ram these six inch Louboutins
straight through your hearts.

Some sigh, like a mild evening wind,
my hand
sleeps on my folded knee, the hairs
from the nape of my neck
stand like fair soldiers, soft
static runs through with a shiver—
an engine purring,
like a cat or thunderstorm
on the slated bedroom roof.
More moments like these,
non-jumpers glued to a ledge.
I'm leaving, I'm going,
but staying, yet hoping.

I don't have a friend
or a care, not even a
leg. I can't stand up.

I was half dead anyway, so there was
really no need for the *******.
Lemon sherbet, cherry lollipops,
sweet as pie and whatever you want.
I like diamonds, cold and shiny,
I like boys that never liked me,
I'm too scared to be cared for,
too stupid to be careful,
too many times scorned by past lovers
unprotected by my brothers
unloved by my sister and hated by myself.
I can't afford to be rich, or a drunk.
I'm torn. A ***** with no lovers.
I'm bored.

Sand burns red, sunlight hits the little
waves, dappled Connemara coat.
Berries form. Sweet orbs,
sweet life, Spring ticks over.
Time's a running clock, silent
and unnoticed. May dances in
on a breeze. No ribbons, no pole.
The dandelions roar in the field,
in the garden, daisies blush
and whisper to the trees
the hawthorn blushes too,
what giggling conversation
takes place on the seashore?

Your car came through town
a queen on her chair
with a silver spider web
smashed windscreen
and no door
on a scrap truck.

I didn't call you.

Told you in the pub last night
it was none of my business now
if you died or not.

Did I kiss that boy on the stairs?
I can feel myself falling in love already.

I stole prosecco off the kitchen counter,
drank the whole bottle.
It fizzed like stars and hopes and dreams
in my belly and
I started walking when the sun came up.

Constant kitchen bickering
the clock, tick tick, ticking
the ******* ******* "you don't
need looks, or a boy to love you,
you have brains"
but no money
no job for my daddy
no college
no college for me.

You didn't jar with me when I saw you
I didn't want to cry,
so that was good, I guess.
Your girlfriend ignored me so
my girlfriends called her a *****.
(Not to her face, but the sentiment
was real.)

I asked you had you found the earrings
I left in yours
when you threw a party for my birthday

you said
yes, and I didn't believe you
but you described them perfectly,
in a way that told me you had studied them for a little while
before deciding not to throw them out.

they're in the bottom of your bedside press
with all your other memories of me.

I almost wanted you to keep them,
maybe years from now we would meet in a bar in our hometown, you having never left. And you would go home and retrieve them and think;
"What if?"

She is so sure of it, one minute,
then the next is a flurry of tears,
curse words and disappointments.
I can never say the right words,
distrustful stance;
she raised me. She can ground me,
she thinks I would lie in a heartbeat.
She waits for
some lady in pinstripes
with money on her mind. "Can I
drain the mind of the poet for cash?"
She will ask, and sleep on her dollar pile
in diamonds and furs,
my mother a pea in the eighth mattress
down,
never noticed by thieves, the true princess.

Imogen, here's some advice
never give yourself to a boy
that doesn't love you like I do
never let any man convince you
to sacrifice what you have
because you want him to love you.
I did that, I forgot who I was
thought I was worthless
and now I know I am.
Baby sister, know that I'm sorry
for everything I did wrong
I made enemies, so many enemies
and work so hard now
to be the best I can, but it's not working
nobody wants me,
only Clara cares and I'm grateful
for her but so empty all the time.
So Immy don't do what I did
stay true to yourself
stay young, stay a kid,
stay sweet,
remember I love you more
than any boy ever will.

Every Sunday the same lurching
same turning
It's a problem I'm fixing
just a little more than recommended
just enough to forget things.

How do you explain
to someone who is always there
how lonely it is?

How do I feel sad
when I am sideways on a rock
hurtling through space
through black and night
past stars and everything?
How do I feel lonely
on seven billion people planet
and a house full of family
and a mind full of voices?

I rang Bill last night,
he was in a *******.
Hey, I thought, at least he's living.

Admittedly I miss kissing you
miss your smell and stealing
your cigarettes
but really I just miss you
and the talks we would have
about nothing, for hours.

I dreamt I killed a man.
Somebody really burnt
the old mill to the ground
down in a crackling
bonfire
as half the town just watched,
eyes wide and gaping mouths
like mackerel.
My skin is whiter
than the snowdrops
in my garden. I imagine
you, kissing my belly.
I wish someone would just
relight me.

It comes in fits and bursts
I hide from it sometimes

others, I zip up the backless
dress, stick on my heels

and strut
take the knife and sing

cut loose
swing my hips and forget

I am heavier than I should be,
remember all the boys that used me

used to want me,
glare in the mirror and say

today
I can be better than I have ever been

today
I am queen

today
I am blonde and young and beautiful

and fabulous,
drink ***** raw as burning flesh

my mind is a million men on fire
screaming and dancing

only alive as it is dying.
I am a *****, I am a metaphor

I am the only one,
only me, only.

My heart is a brick and an ice cube,
you were a stick in the ground
my dog buried once and dug up
every beat is a crunch crunch sound
music has no place here
and I feel I am sinking again
into the bog's cold tea juices
into the depths of the ocean
I am a plane caught fire
drown it out.

I think I'd like to recline into my mind
for a while and just speak French.
Ooh la la my pretend friends
inside my head are real again
their little voices sont parfait
here I drink tea and discuss politics
au francais and he didn't leave me,
Rachel isn't dying and it's okay.

There is an ocean in my ears
my face is hot and in my eyes
swim black and salty tears.
I dream of summer, of icy waves
drowning me, dissolving me
in my Atlantic sea, right to the bones of me-
of drifting, peacefully, piece by piece,
femur by phalange, and tinkling
toward the sand with xylophone sounds.
Salt crusting on the calcium
and drying in the hazy heat
packed down by layers of wet
sludge and seaweed for years
until I am a fossil.

Build up the tumbled down wall
again
stick the last red brick back in,
fix it with chewing gum, glue
and leave. It's fine. It is.

Close up the dam
stop up the river.
Fields drain, crops wither
and die, my eyes dry,
how foolish was I
to dream it could be different.

Forever caged by our fears
the past mistakes that haunt
our moments in the half wake
condemned to relive
every old nightmare,
to fear ourselves and never love
again. And yet,
there is the look you give me
in the mornings
half closed eyes, observing
tired face with turned up corners
of your mouth. When you don't
stop staring unless I tell you to,
that tells me you could love me
if you tried.

By Tuesday they'll let me vote
and stop protecting me.
Push me out into the big wide world
and forget me. Who will love me then?
When all my hair has fallen out
and they let me buy
big bottles of ***** to soothe myself.
Who will love me then?
Still vulnerable, but discounted by them.
****** out on my **** into the wild
with sharp words and a bucketful
of angry tears.

Maybe I'm just no good at what I do.

My clouds all have silver lines
hung with fat steel
hooks
into the puddles
casting reflections
into the tunnel of mirrors, the fish swim by
sometimes they bite. Those nights we eat.

Maybe I'm just no good at wanting you,
maybe my dreams of you are wishes
that may come true but make you say
be careful
be careful of what you

wish
for.


We eat enough, we come too full to talk
and stuffed like plucked birds -
forever flightless.

Maybe I love you but don't think I do,
the only way I could have you all
is if I ate you whole

(I would cover you in honey first.)

I told her :
"I hate him 24 hours a day on weekdays,
abhor him most of the time
until I'm in bed with him and we lie there
saying nothing except my declaration
that we're not having ***, and he says 'OK'
I hate him 20 hours a day on weekends
on average. I despise his existence while
both of us are vertical. I feel tired when he's not
there."
She nodded and kept on smoking, world weary,
having heard it all before,
she nodded twice.
I said : "We'll fight tonight"
she laughed and she was right.

Upon your leave my body crumbled.
The doctors said thyroid things but I found it
poignant that you took ten percent
of my body weight and half my hair
when you went. My teeth broke,
but now you're back, and as I stood blind drunk
in your kitchen you said kind words to me
that I don't really remember but I know
in my heart they didn't fix me.

I went away and dropped a dress size
and then came back. You told me I looked good
in disco pants. Asked me to go back
to your house. God, you treat me like ****.

I said yes. Didn't try to play hard to get
just went with you in my heels, smoked
your friend's **** and followed you
like a lost puppy to bed after you went.

Lay in your arms and you definitely
hugged me tighter than before and kissed me
all down my front and up my arms
and swore that you missed me.

God, you treat me like ****.

Once you called me beautiful, for a laugh
and on my worst days I call back to that
just as I rely on ***** and dope
I rely on memories of our good days
when we could sit in bed and simmer
in eachothers warmth, I asked my friend
if I was ugly , she said no, you're not fat
anymore
but I wanted her to say "yes you are,
don't go fishing for compliments you *****"
because you used to say that.
It made your kind words mean so much more.

There are good memories
and thank you for those, I suppose.
Thank you for caring from time
to time, I missed you for a few days
but now don't miss you, just
the idea of you and the notion
of having the same boy want me
for any time at all.

My country is my cradle, gently rocking,
gently spinning dreams of further isles,
prosperous waters and rivers of gold.

Dystopian land of watercolour sunsets
the fiery sea illuminates foreign pathways
and we know in our cold cores we must go.

It's the same old betrayal I've been expecting,
with hair like fire she graced you, two
hawks circling high above your prey,
my mousey whiskers trembling in anticipation
to be snapped up by bony yellow beaks
and see my friends stand with the same old pathos
saying it's not my fault and never was.
I wonder why I ever came out from under my rock
and why I stepped long legged into the path
of predators. Why did I expect different
when experiments have provided me with quite
conclusive data. Why would I,
seeing no merit in faith, be as blind as this?
Air headed blonde ***** with a high IQ and no smarts?

You don't sound special.
My name doesn't drip off your tongue
like a rolling wave. Like honey
or a dew drop off a leaf. You sound
like home and smell like rolling
tobacco. Your sallow skin turns
olive on the bog when you sleep in
instead of waking up at six am
to beat the sun. There's always oil
in your fingernails from the garage
since you dropped out of school -
but now you're going places.
Despite what everyone said and despite
the fact you have to ask me how to
spell some things and despite
your excessive drinking and even though
you left me I hope you're coming back.

Multicoloured streamers torn and confetti
spread below your feet. A whole pile
of my insides just for you. The baseball bat
swings loosely in your muscled hand
and all the while, I lay here, silent.

These are the last words I have for you.

Love is for the weak and so I fought it.
But you drove it into me against my will,
waited for me to dissolve in it
then left my love behind
and left me lying still.

I suppose I spoke too soon.
Thought too quickly and let
my hopes climb walls like creepers -
vines entwined like the blue veins
in wrists, pale and visible in light.
I spoke far too soon.
Now nights will be cold, as before,
and when the blackness rolls in
I will hear no gentle breathing
or talking in your sleep. Feel no arms
wrapped around me at five am,
and I don't know if the worst part
was when you said you cared for me
or how obviously you didn't.

We sowed the seeds and faced them north -
sat on the ground and pushed fresh shoots
down with pokey fingers and old *******,
poured salt on the soil so nothing could grow.

But the summer was hotter than we'd imagined.
The caterpillar we kept caged spawned wings
undetered by our criticism and clenched hands.
We could not stop nature, though we tried.

Awoke to our patch full of fruit and vines
and tried to destroy it with poison and lies.
Watched every tillering flower bloom back twice
as though time were the only cure for loneliness.

I am far too old for you, and more mature
by a million miles. I roll my eyes at you

more than I do at my drunken mother
and that's really something to take note of.

Every word you say prints itself on my brain,
though it's all *******, it's vital to me.

Half needing you, half hating you, half
myself I have left half of me behind somewhere

like a handbag on the train, with half my soul
and not my last fifty cents and my make up bag

and not dried up mascara, but all of my sense -
left it behind, let it fly far away.

I float in my ignorance.

I have expensive taste, I love
leather and satin and innocence,
and its willingness to give me things;
diamonds clawed from the ground
by peasants, miles below oil,
and boys that call me beautiful
when I so clearly am not.

I love jewellery, the gold
that binds it's way round my wrist.
Asp quietly slithering alongside it -
by my arteries, twisting repeatedly,
kissing my blood stream, pulse
throbbing beneath the long pearly
fangs, ready to puncture skin.

My addiction is killing me
the shiny things, the pyrite,
the glittering quartz is all worthless.
And terrified of the outcry I flaunt
what I have - all fool's gold, all of it.
Only for fools that we kiss,
you do not love me and so I am foolish.

Heavy sticky eyelids drooping,
mascara heavy lashes flicking out
in curls one by one, fighting sleep,
fought it last night until I could
take no more. Made it to
4am by white powder and woke
to a thin roll of red stringy Thai smoke
that stank up the house and helped
me forget for a little while.
What am I doing waiting for your call
so late because I need to be held
and can't sleep alone.

There was always an unspoken assertion
that there was time before this,
before my time. Ninety six. A few billion years
in fact, before this. I knew about Jesus
and world wars but had always assumed
my parents had evolved from dust
to just be
thirty-something. Spontaneously
erupting from nothing the day I was born, carrying
on as normal three lives and my brother's,
that until then had never existed. Like ninety
six was the beginning of it all and all history.
It never occurred to me
or became any afterthought that mine
was just another life on a timeline.
That my mother would be ashamed to have once been
a Stalinist. Or that my father would have lifted
women and children over a cemetery wall
during an IRA funeral in Belfast under fire.

Your psychopathic sleep hours tick by slowly,
dreamless time, unconscious to the world -

a temporary death each night. Do you know
how much you hurt me? I suppose you do.

I crumbled like the flaky leaves in autumn
underneath your feet, and fell for another boy

eventually. You moved away, and now sleep undisturbed
with another girl. She must sleep soundly too,

oblivious to your reputation, the way you once ate
fields of girls as though you were a swarm of summer locusts.

Piano, piano, soft as moonlight
silken fingers on ivory skin. Glissando --
run your hand up my thigh
plucking every string. Arco, arco.
Softly, softly, the clarinets breath in, breath out
arms envelop me in the tune up,
four notes each fifths apart. Your voice
chimes lovely, the conductor flicks start.

A symphony, a symphony, a whole opera
house inside this bed. Observe me through
small binoculars, roll back your eyes into your head.
Violins slow crescendo, your sigh
an answering phrase from the cello,
listen to the tuba and the piccolo
and the mounting tension. Crescendo, crescendo,
forte, forte. Presto boy, presto. Ritornello.
Fin. Dream with me. Belissimo.

Romance is over. Don't try and woo me, ***
before marriage is the done thing lately. I don't believe
in roses or walks on the sunlit beach, I don't believe
in Sunday clothes or boys on their best behaviour.
I believe in making me laugh and when I say
"There's so much to see" and you say "I'm as happy
as I'll ever be" because you have no dreams, and I say
"Would you come with me?"

I do believe
in common differences and long nights in the freezing
cold because I have felt love with my head slamming off
a headboard and I have felt love with my head
down a toilet, vomiting up whiskey with my hair
being held by weak hands in a loose knot above me,
the noose of my dignity.
I have felt love while standing
in the ocean at midnight, off my face, and my friends
shouting "Don't swim!" Love is not angels or
cherubic babies
with wings, or seraphim. Love is just a thing
to con us into reproducing. Creating variation
of the species. We could make love
endlessly.

Stood between a giant and a child
bruised by fists with a blue line striped
across his nose like a toothy kiss. Trying my best
to protect a city boy
from the ones I love with conflict rushing
through my mind like a plastic
drainpipe
after a storm. I imagined if it were you
being pulled by your arms
toward the road across the ground.
I'm sorry I ripped
your jacket when I dragged you off him
but I was and still am sure
that it would have been harder
to love you if you'd killed a man.

I think it would be fun to be in love,
but merely fun. I couldn't see the obsessive
nature taking over me, I couldn't see
myself falling for that trick again. And
anyway, there's uni fast approaching
and I am tied to the tracks. There is
no escaping the rest of my life, it hurtles
toward me at the speed of light. I think
it would be fun to be in love, but
merely fun. Like when your hand moves
up my thigh and when you kiss me
while I'm on the phone. Fun like drugs
in the dead of night, but fun is for children
and I'll soon be no child.

I imagine your DNA replicating hundreds of times
per second. Imagine mitosis exponentially repeating
itself and a billion trillion of you dividing
and multiplying inside of your own body
logarithmically jumping by extremes and simultaneously
dying as fast as you're made. There is not one cell
in your body that was there seven years ago
there is not one cell in your body that is not
resisting DNA mutations caused by your smoking,
you could have had cancer by now, but I watched a documentary
the other day and they are curing cancer with ***.
There are doctors out there saving lives and I
spend my time trying to figure out if I am capable
of love. I don't know the truth and can't lie.

Sweet naivety balanced like dew drops
on the rims on pint glasses filled with the black stuff,
my hair is bleached blonde and I was going through
***** like water, you know those types of nights,
the ones where we tiptoe around each other
not knowing quite how to act, like lovers
or friends. Not knowing quite what we are,
everyone else seems to know so much better than we do.
Like when you were trying to explain to your neighbour
what I was to you but couldn't find the words
and we just nodded to each other repeatedly
saying our names and then laughing and getting
drunk and the night getting blurrier and blurrier
but I remember your hand in mine. It was good.

The windows broken seals make whistling
bottle top noises in the ruckus, the seagulls
swarming like spiders in the back field,
the fat geldings hide by the hedges searching
for shelter. The fire roars and we sip hot whiskeys,
boys stroke their whiskers searching
for wisdom. Hum advertising jingles, hum
in agreement, wolf whistle at the young girls
in small skirts exploring something they call
"fun". Wonder if you remember what is was like.
The taste of brandy reminds me of something,
of a few things. Once I took a bottle to the head
of a boy that betrayed me, stinking of it,
and once my friend spit up like a baby,
milk of her alcoholic mother into my lap
in the back of a car. We're all so much older
and yet younger than we are.

I devoured Plath like fresh fruit
once in my life, when I felt the weight of unchanged air
on my shoulders, when everything was slightly
removed from me by the glass of the bell jar.
I saw no light in any day, nor any reason to be happy.

Things have changed so drastically.
I have so many things to be grateful for,
like kisses and cocktails and beer and
the strum of a freshly tuned instrument,
each note one fifth apart. The roar of a stadium
at the finish of the national anthem, my friend
Harry's hugs and maths homework when
I finally get it right. The fact that you can't actually
touch anything, just come so close to it
that electrons repel each other... Isn't that
amazing? Isn't love amazing? Isn't each
breath, each minute, each time we feel
conscious amazing? Aren't we all just bags
of blood, stranded on a rock in the middle
of space and isn't that a reason to go get good
grades and take drugs and smell roses? Amazing.
You have nothing
to lose and nothing to gain, just a definite end

and then...

Nothingness.

a moment.
A small and subtle
moment
in the early hours of daybreak,
where unwoken minds drift between
the real and unreal, eyes flutter
open/closed and semi-lunar valves
bang, open/closed and make a tiny,
tiny racket. A din so quiet;
to be sat a foot away would
lose it amid the noises of
the heaving of unconscious lungs. This is our moment.

There is a moment
in the early hours. For one half second
he remembers you are there
and pulls you closer.
All worthless notions of yourself forgotten,
you just exist on this small island
drifting on the bedroom waters --
in your head there are no people,
cars or towns. In your head there is just this.