Prozac could be
a better choice than ******* —
but at least coke
has character. I went
for a walk and it made me feel better,
except for the hayfever.
That just made me blind.

I'm so
******* paranoid. I can hear
them laughing
behind me. What's worse
is that I know they're not,
because they don't give
two ***** about me.

It's just a smaller dose of serotonin,
I can get that in ecstasy.
Just a smaller cut of dopamine.
I can get that from boys for a kiss
and some flirting.

I wish you were here to smell my hair again,
I miss you like sleep and like calcium.

It's 7AM in Taipei, I haven't slept yet.
Jetlagged and jaded.
I travelled a long way to see her
strung up on a blood transfusion.
Whimpering like a poor rabbit,
the nurse reminding her
that fresh blood curdles in four hours.

I was motivated a few days ago,
but those feelings come and go.
She'll drain her osteomy bag,
I'll hold the jar but
I'm not really worth anything,
I'm not strong or smart, and look
at her wasting away to nothing.
I should be doing something.

I'm distracting myself by smoking,
dipping in and out through the hazy rings
drifting lazily above my head.
Dreaming of *****. I've never tried it,
but I bet that poppies smell sweeter
in January when it's grey.
I'm thinking of a blue eyed boy.

Maybe he thinks of me, here in Taipei,
where it's ten degrees warmer
and 7AM. It's midnight to him.
There's so much in the world to see
maybe he'd hold the insides in me.
And maybe pain cuts through my discipline,
but I do have plans, honestly.

It terrifies me
that I question
if you finally let me mind you
would I give up on moving

you're an anvil
I would chain myself to
if you gave me half a chance
I'd sand your edges

there's a big world out there
there's things to see
men to sleep with
I call it networking

I think I'd consider giving it up
if you asked me
Chicken
I'd probably give my all to you

even though you treat
me like a disposable
discretionary past time
when you put it in me

I feel a little bit more
whole a little bit more
deranged you mention
the words panic attack

and I'm half insane again
I don't think you
understand
how I feel about you

I don't think you understand
I'd give up dreams for you
I barely even
like you

For saying you want to be with me
and then not calling.
For the last two years,
you've been my last thought
before I sleep,
and the first when I wake up -
yet never mine,
always elusive,
always the dark matter, half-there
schrodinger's boyfriend, you *******,
*******.
**** that I love you,
******* for ******* me
and taking a piece of me
every time you do.
**** feelings, **** your hands
on my heart, your breath
on the back of my neck.
******* for making me cry
on the bus
in public, down the phone
to my exasperated friends.
******* and **** that I love you.

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.

I haven't smoked once today
for the first time in weeks.
Dear God - please,
give me a cigarette. Please
give me a line or a drag
of a joint, or a glass of wine
or a hug or some sunlight.

Work in seven
hours and I've been crying all evening.
But why? For no
**** reason. Paid tomorrow,
and I might
spend it all on drugs or a tattoo,
or tobacco or I wonder
could I pay someone
to love me.

I'm trapped
in an I'm-not-OK-hole—
in a *******.
In a thousand-of-miles-from-the-city hole.

I'm a session moth.
Wake up like a ******, rollie
on the bedside locker.
Not knowing where I am
or how I got there. Jump
into the nearest car and just say
"drive"
and eat nothing but still look fat.

This morning I was suicidal,
I nearly walked out in front of a truck.
But it was alright,
I remembered
I hadn't taken my pill in a day or two,
stopped crying and
went back to work.

I don't understand -
It was just raunchy pictures.
Now when I send them

you say "nice *** lol"
and ask my opinion on
EU politics.

Why does the smell of my own room
remind me of you?
Is that why I was so desperate to leave for good?
Why my parents say "it's so ****
good to see you."

"I still look to see if he's smoking out the back."
My father's unshed tears roll out
and I try and catch them with nothing to catch.
No hands to hold out, even,
I gave up holding out.

There's so many things to get over.
I feel like my happiness has run out;
in my dreams I ask you
"am I dreaming?" and you argue no -
but I know - and pinch myself to prove it.

And when I wake up it's not over.
I've been waiting for so long because
I know it will get better,
but when and how long will it last?

I’m not afraid,
don’t ever assume that I am afraid.

Every time I’ve fallen off the horse
I’ve carried on by foot,

There are a million ways
to get there. I am not afraid.

Love is for the old and weak
and powerless and helpless,

I fight my own battles,
I know that I can hold my head high.

I am self righteous, entitled,
I am sacreligious and perfectly reasonable.

Not a romantic. A logical thinker,
but not afraid. No, never afraid.

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.

A great, big fish, slapped
out on the ice. Rainbow
skin, and the smell of seawater.
I sit
and chat with the fishmonger.
Four kilos of salmon or herring,
for chowder, or something.

I keep finding drugs in my bra.
I'm not even sure
how they get there. I told a boy
how I felt. He got scared, and he ran,
but then he came back
like they usually do.

My boss makes me tired.
This town makes me tired.
I'm getting ***** looks from a pregnant girl
because I slept with the father
of her unborn child.
And I can't even blame her.

This town is a cesspit.
A melting black hole of *******,
ecstasy, Guinness and cheap cocktails.
It smells of cigarette smoke
and no one uses condoms.

I'll be going back to school soon.
A different world where books are cool,
where drugs aren't glamorous
and tobacco is stupid.

Xanax is my new best friend,
it numbs me to dish-washing,
fish shopping, coke sniffing,
*******
and hopeless despair.
Get me out of here.

I climbed to the top of a hill
today and the wind was ridiculous.
I wanted to scream how much I hated your guts
and let the gale carry it back to you
four or five towns away.

But how could I? I wish nothing on you.
You're a little bit beautiful but far too young
and happy in the arms of another girl
I should have been happy too.
That part wasn't your fault.

I drink tea now. Hot and sweet,
and I could never kiss a non-smoker
because I'm far too set in my ways.
Far too callous with my dwindling days,
I don't particularly want to change either.

Recently, I could go a whole car journey
without putting on my seatbelt.
Because, really, we're all dying anyways
and that time you had told me to wear one,
like you cared if I lived or not.

She sniffed
two lines
off her student card,
with her name and dates
then
two lines down
it said medicine, with a smiling face
and a big college emblem.

Two weeks later
she sits
in a bathroom in a new flat
staring at a pissy stick
two pink lines
stare back at her.

The day moves quick,
she rings me, she cries,
I console, she screams-
How? When she did everything
right
the morning after and
he hasn't even texted her.

We call a conference,
best friends pull change
from bank accounts,
communion savings,
credit unions. We all
pile in. Get the girl to England.
Get her to a hospital.
Get her a degree,
we're all in it now.

Valentines day,
out for my birthday
a few close friends,
a bag of dizz.
A plastic pig,
and a quiet conversation in the bathroom
with Rachael.
"Clara thinks I should see someone"
"I think you should too."

"But why?"
I didn't feel bad,
I swear to god I was happy.

I know now I wasn't,
filling myself with drugs
as fast as my blood stream
could run.

"What's up with you Molly?"
Even Dominic was worried
I was just floating on MDMA.
What's up with you, Molly?

He told me he could love me during rag week
and my god I thought it might cure me.
They found me
crying on the steps of the third floor
of Rachael's block
and no one ever found out why.

Not everyone made it out alive.
Oisin lifted me over walls
and Dominic caught me on the other side
and I suppose you could say that in many ways
they were lifting me through.

But think,
when I was in bed with him, stroking his back in little rings
and kissing him. Falling all over again,
so in love with him, some boy
who I'd never met
before that night
left that hotel room
and wound up dead in the Oranmore lake.

But how could you ever talk about that?

Kiss me hard in the car
again, please, just another quick ****
and that's it. I miss you
do you miss me too?
"Kinda."
And that kinda killed me,
in the college canteen crying
to your ****** favourite song on replay
trying not to be seen.
I wish it was ****** coffee too,
it would have been more romantic—
but the freshly ground beans
make for a stupid white girl
and a stupid scene.
And your song isn't even deep
or something worth crying to.

I wanna I wanna I wanna touch you
(you wanna touch me too?)

You told me it was over,
I said: "Let's not be awkward."
Let's be friends.
I was hoping to salvage
some of what we had before.

I was walking to class,
you grabbed me by the shoulder
in an attempt at friendliness.
Knocked me off balance, again,
I gasped - "Don't fall!" you said.

The warning came too late.

The doctors told her: “Leukaemia”.
More cancer? So I munched up Molly
and chain-smoked Benson
in the night club outdoor area.

The lights were stunning,.
We marched a half mile in heels
over frosted ground with knocking knees,
looking for people to please.

New Year’s Eve.
A house filled up to the brim
with big, fat eyes and dancing lovers
in a horrid estate in Sligo town.

2016 rang in, triumphantly.
I was surrounded by beautiful people
drowning in loud music
slept at 8am and dreamt of her.

She's screaming at me
from the tile floor of the bathroom
and there's sick in her hair
so I just ring her mother.

I'm disgusted at her,
it's pathetic. I'm sick of listening
to this, and holding hair back,
and stuffing my hand down throats
to feel the ***** crawl back up to catch me.

I'm standing in a house in a bad estate
and it's 8AM
and how did I get here?
I left my friend behind in a bathroom
because I can't bare to see her and remember
crying in a nightclub bathroom in Carrick
and not knowing why.

The room is spinning, but at least I'm smiling.
I think this boy is quite pretty, really.
Where is she? Sprawled out, puking
in the sheets of her bed. I'm not sympathetic.
Take your medication you headcase,
we need it to function - just take it, I swear.

How can I explain a love that's lost
when it's so present,
yet gone,
when you're here, breathing,
speaking, it's you,
just buying food, visiting your cousins
and sticking up for me.
So happy to see you,
yet the dull pain swims
in my heart and hands,
the dark soup that spills through my veins
tinting everything
and yet
the moment you leave it's the darkest day.

I picture my rage like a church bell, bang,
come now or hell! My fists bunching,
the storming forward. "Are you starting?"
Fear mingling with stagnant *****
into chyme. Screams engulf my mind;
you have been ******* around for way,
way, way too ******* long. Smack.
Fist collides with paper soft skin, kick.
You groaning on the floor, fight night.
Come first light the high subsides,
I will wash my bleeding knuckles and dig
your fractured skin from between
the semi-precious stones in my rings.

You talk about how you would write poetry
and learn an instrument
if only you had the time.
The time,
as though you don't have the same hours
as anyone else.

I'm telling you now, if you truly wished
for the time, you'd have it.
Creation is not a choice, it's a burden,
it's a crick in your neck that must be cracked
an addiction, a drug.
You don't find the time,

you make the time.
You sit awake in the morning just
writing
writing
and pray it's okay.
If it's useless you just...

Continue.

There’s plastic
eyelashes
on the carpet.
Makeup-covered and ridiculous
telling stories
of drunken mishaps. Of tears
and desperation,
tearing these things clean off black eyes
and crying into a bathroom sink.
They say; “put me to bed”
“take out your contacts”
“work in the morning.”

They’re everywhere.
Little harmless spiders,
insects we fear more than insects.
Unmoving, staring, reminding.
They say; “where did you go last night?”
and you remember
trying
to stick them to your eyelids
for twenty minutes, and kissing some boy
and then
ripping them off and sleeping.

They say; “why do you care so much?”
“why are you lying?”
and you’re wondering why
in a house full of girls
there’s a handful of eyes
on every wall, floor and ceiling.
You say “why do I care so much?”
“Why do I cry these off?”
These silly things make you
a devious enchantress
but it’s never enough.

I know boys that have smoked for seven years
and quit for a year
and they're not even twenty.

I know boys that eat
sandwiches
with black hands
black from motor oil and tar
and shower four times a day.

I know boys, I love boys
that can fix cars, milk cows,
get up at six and drive two hours
to work
with three hours sleep
still drunk from the night before
and never puke.

I breathe boys that smell of slurry,
silage, and turf fires
that shout
things about tractors that I can't understand.
Smoke joints at 8AM before work
and reckon they work harder for it.

I love FÁS boys.
Untrained boys,
rough and ready, picked at the seam boys,
home boys, lover boys, my boys,
curse like a sailor and hand on my thigh boys.

"You should stop picking men
based on their ability
to open beer bottles with their teeth"
said Mam. But I love those boys,
those earthy boys,
those make me feel alive boys.

I tell them "paint", and they do—
little hands make big, bold lines
in blues and pinks,
and "look I mixed it,
what colour is it?"
So proud of the dishwater brown.

I want to say: "if you mix many
beautiful things, you lose track of them.
They become all muddled, muddy,
like paint water, all of them."
But they just add glitter to the mess
like sparkles of stars and car headlights
in the darkest night,
in the depths of a hopeless sound.

Seeing grown men cry strikes a chord in me,
a clang, dissonant, the cloudy eye and cracking throat
makes me uneasy. Though it is not just those that trouble me,
a persons freed emotions are trivial things,
yet I weep, sob, lament all the time. Do not misunderstand me.
Do not assume I have no anxious human worry.
I saw Dad cry once when he spoke about his mother.
Isn't it strange to think I would ever cry
for my parents, as though they wouldn't be around forever?
I've cried over friends I have no heed for now,
moods are temperamental. Feelings are irrelevant
and I am slave to their swinging. Cannot switch them off
must move with them and their constant tide.

Stars fade to nothing
then orange - a fog in the distance.
Darkness here is not blackness.
There are no pinpricks,
no windows or beacons of hope
to rely on. Just the glow
of street lamps in their millions.
A well organised army
frozen in time.
Cat's eyes and headlights,
neon street signs and the tick
of a old iron clock. This city sleeps
yet there is no night time—
just a honey glazed haze
the fluorescent glare of two million insomniacs.

You seem so lovely and gentle,
it's nice
that you don't find it strange
when I leave you ten voicemails
drunkenly rapping
about how fantastic life is.

Why,
do I find it so easy, with you,
to embarrass myself?
But I'm never ashamed,
I just laugh when you laugh.

That weird feeling,
that comfortable feeling,
that I haven't been feeling
in a long time now. It's cute.
It's warm and all yellow.

Love is blind. But this isn't love.
This is sugary, syrupy,
I could almost call you sweetheart.
Buy me an ice-cream, maybe,
I might let you see me eat.

You're a bit of a *** head. But that's okay.
I don't mind it really.
You're a little bit lazy -
you remind me of sweet hazy grass
on grass in the summer sun.

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.

You had been pure, little boy, but I dropped you in the mud.
You kneeled, dropped your head, and shone my shoes.

You can no longer be buried
in a pure white coffin, like a child. If you died

I would not buy you lilies. I would not clean your face
anymore. You're tainted, tarnished, poisonous infected.

I cannot lay by you, now I know what I took from you.
It should have been more innocent

More special. But you have been cheapened.
I took everything from you

And still I want more. I, the biblical *****
that stripped you, bit you, broke you.

Black leather
boots; worn through the sole,
my socks are flooded with rain.
The coat
is not mine, hair combed back
and pinned I
may look the business but it's
all a facade.

What if they
hear the buried country accent, see that
I'm an imposter? Realise I'm not even
twenty one? I've got
to push on, keep smiling,
keep climbing, swimming upstream
in my battered black boots.

I like your stupid tattoo
and your ****** piercing
that you got with the boys
in Magaluf
the way you can't spin decks
but you keep trying anyway
your stupid, beautiful laugh

your stories
like the time you stressed out in Ibiza
or blacked out for hours at
the same gig I did
before we'd even met

I'm freaking
I'm 3AM not sleeping
I've never liked someone
that cared about me
I've never met anyone who suits me like you do

I'm desperate to run
you're gripping me by the forearm
as soon as you let go I'm gone
terrified, rabbit in headlights
I want to not be afraid
the lessons I've learnt still haunt me

How can I cast them aside
wash the slate clean
I want to believe that you want me
How can I? Help me, darling
teach me
how can I?

We stumbled home
hand-in-hand as the sun rose
over your notoriously boring
working class hometown.

Not your real hometown
it adopted you.
The place you come from
has a name I can't pronounce.

Your accent is rough—
more common than your native friends.
I think you're afraid that your name
might shame you.

We stood there
outside your gaf in the morning grey.
You told me
that you can't stand your father

my hands ached, I want to
bare myself back to you
but I don't know how.
You just embraced me

kissed me all up the sides of my head.
I want to tell you
nothing has ever been this real for me,
but I can't.
You are everything I didn't know I was hoping for.

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.

There will be no right moment
to throw yourself headfirst into darkness.
To go feeling along the walls
of an unlit room—

hands sliding through cobwebs,
feet shuffling forward
praying the floor does not suddenly give way
to stomach churning nothingness.

You must just go.
Listen to the voice of your lover
honey tongue calling out in the emptiness,
let your steps grow faster.

Run toward the abyss.
You can't accept this void within your mind.
And you will feel his hands soon,
let them guide you.

Drink makes you spill your guts
and I shouldn't stand laughing
pretending I don't know it's real.

You say you adore me.
I think I might be using you
for fun and drugs and validation.

I'm so ****** up.
I'm evil as they come, and everyone
seems to think I'm normal now

I hate myself, but I'm better than you at least.
Maybe I'm mad and I just can't see it.
You said you'd buy me things.

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.

You called. We hadn't
spoken in weeks.
You needed drugs,
I had the contacts.

If I can't get love
from you, I may as well
get ******* and ****
someone new.

Now I'm trying to explain
to a Brazillian kid
what an 8 ball is
at 9pm on a Tuesday.

Drinking packet soup.
It's grey outside,
and I'm working the opening shift
in the morning, boring.

Most of my friends aren't from here,
I know this because of their parents' accents
and their aversion to pig ****
even though they still get tired in the big city.

Most of my friends take drugs,
others don't. Surprisingly the smokers
are the least ****** up.
Least manipulative, capable of loving.

Most of my friends tell me they love me
quite often actually. I don't believe them
but it makes me feel secure like
putting your hand flat on the ground when you have the spins.

Most of my friends have problems, like
crazy mothers or hopeless fathers,
drug problems, money problems, forgetting
who-the-****-they-are problems

and I'm sorry for them but I can't help them
I try and I try to tell them
it will be okay and we will be alright
but they're too busy helping me to see the light.

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.

I can't talk, so I can't work.
The higher register of my voice
is just a squeak. A dramatic dog call.
A whistle on the inhale.

I thought it was tobacco,
but my friends caught the heavy head
and burning skin. So I'll go back
to inhaling slow suicide soon.

Do you think it's ****? The yellow
teeth and hands. The putrid smell.
Signing over your geriatric lungs
to a devil that lets you breathe for a moment.

The chef whistles tunelessly, infuriating
and constant. An asthmatic making music.
I think the rumours are making me ill.
None of it's true and nobody cares.

Today is grey.
It's raining in August and nobody is here.
I'd bake a cake but I can't make cake,
I'd take a drink but that would be silly.

There were seven of us
crammed in a tangled mess.
Four in the back, three in the front, I sat
on your best friends lap.

We were leaving my best friends back
to their house. You drove
like a ******* maniac.
And we were all fantastically twisted drunk.

Fiat Punto sardine can,
my two in the back held hands.
Whispered 'I love you' in their own ears
whenever you took a sharp turn too fast.

But me and the boy supporting my weight
were screaming for faster
and I could feel life moving through me
in the wind rushing past us.

We stopped then, suddenly.
And you put your arm around me
and said "put on your seatbelt."
So I did, because you said so

and on the drive home I felt safe.

It's the tile walls. Hot
water
or
the 3AM dark room
again. The words
spill out, angry
but silent. A thousand things
to never get said. I
imagine
******* your brother again,
imagine
maybe,
you getting furious - hurt, even -
just anything. Showing
any emotion, any shred
of meaning. And I would
scream
"Don't!"
Don't act like I was anything to you.
Any more than an easy ride.
Just a blonde to
love buzz for
when you were high. Your *******
bunny. Just a hopalong.
Someone easy to rely on.

Did it **** you? When I
kissed David?
Well, *******.
I rotted inside, empty for a year.
And you - you tried to tell me you had
feelings. Feelings?
As if you weren't ice on the inside.

I've cried so many times, and you
always got angry when I thought
you were lying.
But be honest, for once,
nothing you ever said was true.
You're a bonafide
con artist. And I wasted 3 years
(nearly)
of my life on you.

I should have never gone back.
Should have never gone back.

It feels different every time.

Whenever I see you it's different,
I'm always some varying level of
completely bastarding
legless drunk. Usually you are too
but that's life though isn't it?
Like our heartless business arrangement,
that's life too.

It gives me life, and drains me of it.
I still maintain I saved you,
everyone hated your girlfriend.
You have terrible taste in girls,
I'd hate me if I knew me
any better. But right now
I don't know who I am.

Nobody knows me anymore.
I've changed that much,
it's tragic really. To lose myself
to an uproar of useless emotions.
I gave up on love a year or so ago
and now I know what I know
I wouldn't go back on it.

I wonder if you told me you loved me
would I feel anything.
Would I be angry, or cynical
or stay here or leave you
because I'm too much of a mess to ever reciprocate it.
Or maybe love triumphs over expectation.
Over death and trouble and devastation.

We'll never know.

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.

My room smells of smoke and cologne.
You seem nice,
your eyes are lovely. My inner thighs
are peppered in bruises,
my legs hurt, my cheeks are flushed still.

It’s sweet to look at the milk skin, the ink blots,
remember I’m real. Remember
the feeling of being wanted,
your weight on me, the sweet nothings,
the drunken kissing, the moaning.

I want to hold on to you, but I’m
sure I’d be fine without you.  My ex
had a baby, I wasn’t angry.
I wished him luck; it’s a girl.
A new main lady.

I drank something crazy, I lost my cigarettes,
brought you home and we went to bed.
I wonder could this ever be anything really;
could I ever look into your eyes
and say I love the bones of you?

The flat is cold and the couch
is lonely. I scrape leftover
rice from the pan on the stove,
tell all my friends I love them.
Wonder if they know.
The sky is grey and a hurricane
is blowing in my home town,
I watch each gust of wind
and wonder if there's a molecule
of your breath in there.
The chemo was too painful, he said.
So now we wait on edge,
tread on eggshells and fight
nicotine cravings. Like..?
Isn't it funny the smoke is what's killing him
and that makes you want a cigarette?
Who am I? Where am I?
What am I doing? If I bury my head
in the spine of a jellyfish book
would their radial symmetry numb me?
If I buried my head in your spine,
would you hold me?
Here I am - wedged in a crevice.
Stuck to the precipice of the same old abyss. Aren't we all dying?
I wonder if the clothes are dry yet.

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.

Bless you, child.
The lines of your palm
a yellow legal pad
I want to write down my life on

to sign myself over to you
in the one moment. The next—
L'appel du vide.
I am not a girl supposed to be tied down.

Yet you coax me with your frankness.
It frightens me, your realness
I would like to blow you like a puff of smoke
and watch you drift into fog

with your commitment.
With your leases and your plans
and your baby names and your mortgage
and your job

and the way you admit you may
not love me in a year or ten.
Well I may not love you in a day
or two

I say, praying I seem nonchalant.
Your adoration wraps me up,
seems we were made to be
yet you’ve heard how the proverbs go

I do not like the thought of growing old.
My perpetual sadness will always
tighten its grip on the rope, you know
the brightest flame is always fastest cold.

"I've noticed you cry a lot."
Yeah, that's me. On the wardrobe
door floating on the Atlantic. Except
nobody's noticed the ship's sunk.
I think they're reclining on lidos,
like the water is warm for them.

A tsunami rushing up side streets—
life flows on, collecting things.
Stops for no one and if you fall
you're dragged along until
you find your feet.
I'm drowning here, nobody else
has noticed the swell.

I've pressed paused on a stopwatch,
trying to grasp at a flimsy reality.
They're still all doing the motions,
I'm stuck still refusing to speak.
My friends are strangers in the street,
they're all calm in the madness.
Maybe the chaos is all in my head,
time carries on for everyone but me.

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.