Flood myself with
poison
my blood with
love, alcohol,
what ever drugs they give me.
Produce antibodies,
fall asleep. Awaken; groan.
Roll over, smell you.

Don't ever leave me.

Two hours later,
flood my bed with
sighs, smell your
smell, try
not to care
then cry.

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.

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.

I don’t know if happiness is this ability I have
to just not be sad, or, if I was truly happy,
would I just… know.
There is no set algorithm, no checklist
in a strange man’s spiral bound notebook,
and the only emotion I can feel is anger
at nothing in particular – and everyone.
If you refuse to let people past your walls
I suppose you can’t lose faith when they let you down –
repeatedly -
though I always do.
I was never anything but kind to you
even though you always leave me.

I don’t want to be loved
nor forgotten either.

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.

Porcelain.
They get more pretend,
every one of them. More ridiculous,
film star, rich kid,
sometimes I don't even meet them.

Trophies. Little silver spoons,
rugby players, Tories, DJs.
They come from faraway places,
I make myself sound amazing,
make believe that it means something.

My little heart has been diced up
like the rats in the labs that I slice up.
Running the same experiments,
it gets boring after a while.
I can't stick at it for too long.

Time to move on.
Playing games in the lives of real people,
I want to be a story at parties,
a tale to regale for a suited man
in an interview.
I'll make you seem interesting.

I want to be shiny and pretty and new
for a week or two.
Don't take me for granted,
don't forget me but don't hang around.
I have lives to live, things to do.

I got ******* caught in my nose piercing
and the *** was overwhelmingly
disappointing.
He tried to spoon me
but I just don't have time for that,
you know? I just don't want that.

He was a **** kiss,
probably had no notion of a female ******,
he's a country boy stoner
doing **** all ever.

They used my student card
to chop up the coke
while I puked behind the car.
That's home though. That's life here.

And you, you ******,
when I woke up I missed you.
I really ******* miss you.

Loneliness is an epidemic.
To have all your breaths cut short
by the ghost of a boy fizzled out.
Just a burned down wick,
the aluminium shell of a tealight.
I didn't even burn at both ends.

By the mist of an old bee sting.
Was pain any better than this?
I remember deciding to stop feeling
but not why I did.
Loneliness is a piercing migraine.
I am a bottle washed smooth by the sea.

My skin is a reused Manila envelope.
Well used and travelled,
every scar is an ink blot, how did
you know where I was going? You didn't.
Loneliness is an epidemic and yet
you scream in my loneliest moments.

Paradoxical paradise
I love
drugs - and I hate them.
I hate
staring at myself in the mirror
of a dark bathroom
drowning in my own big eyes
stretched pupils
I hate the smell of *****
the chemical taste of MDMA
and the non-taste numbness
of speed
or *******.
I hate the emptiness,
I hate the crowd that swills around me-
hundreds of them
and I'm still ******* lonely.

But I love
getting so high that I'm just
numb
empty and lifeless and childlike,
kissing strangers,
forgetting the meaning of love.

So I love being drunk
I love casual *** and doing what I want
I love the facade
I love to forget everything else.

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.

The feeling is viscous. Impermeable.
I’m restless, doomed. I can’t explain
why I love art
but wear a lab coat, just
so I’m forced to remember
what life is worth.
I can’t find that in words.

A white noise, a terrible ringing. I
used to feel nothing. Not anything.
Now I hear my fear and anger competing.
I’m listless. Delusional.
My mind is irrational.
My heart says “don’t listen”
but I can’t always hear it.

I wouldn’t
hurt myself anymore, but sometimes
I can’t sleep on my side.
I’m balding from tearing
my hair out. Sometimes
I dream I’m pulling at wires
and on waking my palms are bleeding, sometimes

I wake up and I’m crying,
fingernails buried alive, and I’m prying them
out from under my skin.
But, these are just days the SSRI’s
aren’t working,
the days when I'm ill
and my whole body's hurting.

My dad is so sad - he says
“when will you stop them”
I say “hopefully never.”
He’s downtrodden. I’m sodden in rain.

I want to lie in bed today.
Is that okay? What if I
never get up? What if I forget
how to feel, and lie here
for weeks and weeks upon end?
I’m so afraid of
losing my mind again.

It's weird but, you said it,
how you had to close all the doors
like I tapped every railing
and blinked three times.

You only ever wrote in black ink.
I'm two hours early for every
single
train.
I have dreams that I miss them
every
single
night.

You're sorry that you're angry
because you can't settle down.
I chose not to plan anything
that I can’t control.

I remember feeling
my bones hurt, because the pencil
lay sideways
on the desk. And my heart break
just because I couldn't get through on the phone.

Do you see yourself in me?
Could you bear to kiss me,
or would you dry heave
and rinse your mouth out
six times a day
repeatedly?

I’m compulsively
dotting i’s in the main library.
Red bullet points, but my wounds
bleed blue ink. “Wouldn’t it be nice?”
you say
“to be sane for a day?”

I look at you, not really feeling anything.
I find it
frustrating
that you don’t want me
and I’m left counting,
obsessively
nitpicking.

Loneliness is a silence,
a kind of tinnitus, a ringing.
I’m not sure if I’m deaf or
it’s really that no one’s speaking.
“You aren’t worth anything”
We both look up, but
neither of our lips are moving.

It’s an anxious tapping. Midnight
cigarettes so you can
taste
your breath. How else
would you know you were living?
Although
there is nothing to fear but fear,
so I couldn’t fear death.

Beautiful, beautiful
the waves of my Atlantic lick the sand.
Big green pool I've invested true love in.

I have bled into that water.
Run naked along the beach, hugged a boy
I thought might love me

but really didn't and never would.
That silly boy hurt me and tore me apart
like the wings of a butterfly.

Bright and vaguely translucent.
Surprising loud
and perfectly quiet

I was a bumblebee's hum.
My mouth made a perfect round O!
A little girlish sound I vowed

to never make again.
The hurt, I vowed to never
ever

feel that hurt again.
So I found a beautiful, beautiful
boy

and took everything from him.

At 2am, the knock came. Axe murderer loud,
my little brother answered the door.
You asked if I was in, and when he said
'Yes' you handed him a firecracker
and stomped down to my room.
I was asleep. "Gerrup t'****"

I should have, by all rights, shat myself,
but I knew you would come in the end.
You act like you don't care, but
you do a bit. Awkwardness doesn't work
for us anymore. We're far too comfortable
In each others madness.

We learned to have *** sober. It was funny,
it's been nearly a year of constant want
and yet only now can we summon
the courage to open ourselves to one another
in sound state of mind.
(The lights are still off.)

I think you're beautiful, but I can't
let you see me in my vulnerable state
on the brink of ecstasy. No,
that would make it too easy.
Then you roll over and fall asleep,
and I lie there thinking until morning.

The smell of you lingers, cigarettes and whiskey
stay with me 'til the close of evening.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Your name has a bitter
taste, like cologne. A muggy
sweet scent that deceived me so easily.
I always tried
to spit it out, but the spray
stuck fast
to the roof of my mouth.
Made me heady,
heavy. Sleepy. I started nodding,
going. Wake me up later,
give me a month or two.
Shake me when the sight of the back
of you won't phase me.
Shout when your eyes and your smile don't nauseate me.
Please let me sleep off the feeling
of losing again. Of everything slipping
into the ocean, of my life
crumbling and cracking open like old brick walls and peeling front doors
and old wardrobes.
I thought you could be
that breath of fresh air I needed so badly,
to come rushing in when the bell jar
cracked open.
But you weren't,
you weren't anything special,
you were an Oxfam shop
bottle of cheap perfume.

Suddenly, it's not at all
awkward, between us anymore
and although I enjoy your company
as much and as often as possible
I wish it was like before
when my face would burn red to see you
around anyone else
because you knew things about me they didn't.

But I knew this would happen,
I think you're sweet. I'm sure she'll find
that spot behind your ear
I used to rub in a circular motion
when we'd lie in a comfortable silence.
I'm sure she'll be better for you
and skinnier, prettier, kinder,
much less petty and jealous.

Much less, much less than me.

You know I don't like it *****
I keep my freak for the streets.
You know it's just
pull the duvet over my head
so it's just you and me
hidden in this little space.

It's the voice you make
when you want to stay on the phone.
Softened, gentle
oh-so-lovely
the look you give me in the half light
misty, half closed eyes,
turned up corners of your mouth.

How can I love you this much
and yet
not at all?
In this comfortable way
like a best friend
or a husband.

It's not exciting at all
and definitely not rewarding
but I care far too little about myself to stop it
and love you too much to change it.

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.

I lie beside him and I'm tiny,
weak and helpless, but he
holds me sleeping, strokes
my hair. I
forget with one quick
movement he could **** me.

Two hundred pounds, he lifts me.
Eats twice as much as I do,
plays guitar I
play ukulele. Giant,
how do I know that you
won't break me? I am wary.

Shatter me if you will, take my body
it's no use to me anymore
it's too unholy. Just leave my heart
alone it's
been overused and battered,
bruised and I can't
cry on my own again.

You're leaving —
Surfactant. Summer
months reduce attraction.
No one remembers fast food,
the things they eat for convenience.

No one would miss it in its absence.
I'll want you even when
Summer dissolves you. Dilutes
my memory into flat beer shandy.
I won't call you.

The summer is short,
the road is short.
But too much sun can
make a man insane. Time
is a solvent. An effective surfactant.
Say you'll miss me
and think of me in muggy summer rain.

It's daylight, bright,
it's warm, the sun is yellow and gentle.
There is a breeze, but it's soft,
easy.
It's a Caribbean breeze,
the sea is cool and refreshing,
and I am treading water.

It's in my ears.
It laps softly into my mouth,
I spit it out,
draw breath and inhale the spray.
My arms and legs flap
beneath the surface, creating
little concentric rings,
little bobbing circles that span outward.
I am the swan, seemingly graceful,
kicking furiously to stay afloat.
Every so often I lose my grip
on the nothingness, and sink.
Momentarily an anchor. Motionless.

Here, I am lost, no one can see me,
planes fly overhead
and I am just a speck on the sea.

Why do I keep treading. I could just
let myself drown in it,
but once I saw an island
swathed in sand and palm trees,
coconuts and banana plants
and I believe it's still out there
so I just keep swimming.

If I could only dream of blissfulness.
Oblivion and oddity riddle my sleeping mind
and my closed eyes make
hallucinations
which never seem to fade.
The shutters open, mother draws the curtains
but still the shadows dart beneath the bookcase.

We drank myself into an unbreakable stupor
and just a year since I vowed to feel nothing in extreme,
I could not cry if I tried.

And trust me, I try.
But things change, I've changed. While all you remain
and wonder why I'm throwing my life away.

I only breathe when I sing,
feel the rain on my skin and the warmth of the sun
and
with your fingers through my hair I am happy again.

But love or fear is not an option.
Only eventual dreamless death.

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.

I wonder who she is.
Whoever's got your attention now.
I can't believe
I've done this to myself again.

You won't even realise
what a mess I am. And for what?
Two more nights in a car,
and a morning watching two and a half men?

I'm pathetic.
I've been run into the ground too many times
and I don't understand
how boys don't have feelings.

What is it about me
that makes them think - "Ooh,
she looks tasty, and ripe
for the picking."

Then for taking one bite and dropping?
And thinking
"it's only one little piece"
but over the years I'm ate to the core.

I'm just the passing fancy.
A little bit pretty,
but boring or something.
Why have I done this to myself again?

You’re drunkenly screaming,
hands against the skin where
my kidneys would be. Telling
same-old-stories, you’re angry with me.
Fingers flexed on a cigarette, smoking through
yellow teeth into my hair, sipping
a yellow drink in a clear plastic cup.
Your accent is familiar, doesn’t
belong here. Sounds like what
home used to be.

You’re telling me I may be profoundly
sad, but I’ve come to understand
that even if you love someone
they may not stick around.
I’m fine, in an unbreakable mind frame.
Happy. That’s not up for discussion.
You’re begging me
to not wind up dead.
Just shut up. Drink your double whiskey.
I’ll cry when it suits me.

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.

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 ****.

My teeth are sore, lips cut,
my eyes are dry and my ankle
hurts when I twist it back
because the bouncer
****** me into a puddle.

I could take 100 pills, little colours,
little fun shapes,
but you know
it still wouldn't fix me.
It wouldn't fill the hole in me.

I have nothing left now.

There's no boy my heart calls for in the night
except you, boy,
my only boy, but you're gone from me now.

It's real this time, my grinding teeth agree.
A baby's cry eats at my soul.
I cry for my baby and it eats at my soul.

I'm so tired
and I've been off my face
for a week now.

I dived into the lake to escape the killer bees
but on resurfacing
they've started to sting me.
I can't live underwater for much longer
but I can't live without it, you,
or whatever.

He had found someone new,
pale turned white, the blood rushed
out of my face,
ears rang like a bomb went bang
I cried for the longest time
until I was empty and rocked
myself to sleep in the dark.

When you found someone new,
or old,
I remembered how you called her a ******,
I laughed, was a little bit sad,
but I guess that means it's not love.

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.

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.

Grey days melt sideways --
constantly overlapping, calculating and deriving,
integrating and balancing chemical equations,
tell the teachers I am chasing dreams with cold numbers,
lines on the page or Lego blocks.
If you added every one together ad infinitum
it would be zero. Doesn't that say so much? Or enough?
Midnight brings music and words, I bury my mind
in their useless and beautiful noises.

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.

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.

I'm so sure
there is a world out there
for me, in which
you are not the sole light source,
or the green leafy gaps
in the trees. Where

the composted earth-
warm and crumbled
under my feet- is not
you. A place
where you do not live
in the foam
on the ocean waves
or in the hollow of the conch
shells.

It's a 4AM start
on the sofa, still drunk
and heading to bed.
And you're there,
in the hallway.
So I rub my eyes and know
you'll be gone when
I take down
my hands.

I press my fingers into the sockets
and say
"I miss you"
I can smell you as if you're there
keep my eyes closed for two more
minutes, breathing.
Then I let go
and go to bed.

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.

Good evening.
It’s hot, but the dark clouds roll in
promising rain.

I can’t stop shaking, remember
drinking to forget the pain.
Now I can’t even find it

in me to go out for the night,
take loads of drugs and
hospitalise

myself. I’ve been there
done that too many times.
I just want to sit here.

All my friends are off
having fun. The boys
I want are in love

with girls who aren’t me.
Excuse me, can I offer you
something, something,
would you like anything else? It’s final call.

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.

Cracking open.
I feel the
skin give way like
fractured marble.

Porcelain.
Your words a sledgehammer.
My thoughts like
moisture under years-old warping
floorboards.

I touch my pen
to paper and the ink is blood,
it rushes out into a little
puddle.
I miss when I cut myself
and let out steam.

like the rubble of an old house
that had burnt down and left me for dead,
and I'd survived.

Drunk, weeks ago,
you said

"Whatever happens we're best friends"

your hugs felt familiar,
like home but I was wary.

I went from loving you endlessly,
young girl with an innocent pain
to coldhearted, callous

"She must of loved him blind, that she needed
to replace him with all those boys."

That was the smartest thing the boy
with straight A's in my physics class
had ever said.

You are still
mist in the mornings.
Dreamtime, still haunting.
Unforgettable ghost, my heart's healed wound
and in the half light
you stand by the door in my bedroom
a winking shadow, gone then,
dissolved and lost to the air.
My breath catches like a skipping
CD
and I know you're not there—
the curtain ripples and I shiver
you are still here, always,
stalking my thoughts, feeding my fear.

You are dreamtime.
You saturate my best friend -
you both wear the same cologne.

You are,
you are my manic grin at random moments
before I remember.

You echo in my giggles
when I'm lost in thought,
in the sighs when I think of you.

You fill all the empty space.
A rustling curtain, even though
I know. I know

you aren't here.
You aren't in love with me,
nor I with you.

You are nothingness,
a midnight memory.
You are a gaping hole in me.

Gaping. Gaping.

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?"

A few floors up.
The doors slid closed
and stayed shut.

We could have ascended forever,
or seconds. You were so pretty.
Looked at me from under your lashes,

smiled and I was transfixed.
We stopped at every floor.
You could have got off

but you lingered. The smell of you
filled the small space
and we kept climbing.

The higher we went
the harder it was
to say anything.

Too afraid to speak. Too vulnerable.
Strung up by thoughts of other people.
Then the bell rang and you got off.

Goodbye then, I should have
asked you to stay but you would
have gone anyway.

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.

You sicken me.
Put me in bad form in a heartbeat—
I don't
understand
how I didn't realise all these
feelings would come back.

It took so ******* long
just to get over you.
Why did I think you'd be nice to me?

The worst thing being
I can't tell a soul. Can't breathe a word
about the hold you have on me.
You just
belittle me. Make me feel tiny.
Not just because I'm 19
and you're 23, but you make me feel
young and silly.

You embarass me.