i know the bites on your neck were wrong i was told not to leave traces of my Self
because i do not belong

sorry for screaming your name
(but i guess it was worth it)
when you choked me and said quiet down

the stain on my ******* looks like the ****** mary
(i think she's mad at me) because i begged you to **** me  
sideways and backwards
digging screaming sweating pounding sighing
the ****** mary is crawling out of my ***** trying to make me
pure

you are the closest tangible thing and you don't even exist

This time I will not apologize
or come crawling back to you
searching for acceptance
because the only thing I should be sorry for
is letting you treat me this way.

We never found each other
amongst the traffic of our lives,
though I waited for you
in a pauper's tomb;
overgrown with pre-existing grass
and violent rosebush.

What is left after old sentiment?
After the nights spent hoping
for your uncertainty,
for any kind of sadness
that may bring you back to me.
I have not found the answer yet

and I have stopped asking the question.
I just work the day,
collecting free moments
as ash mounts the incense burner,
over-thinking each word exchanged
across the pillow of my mind.

The television news keeps rolling,
the world keeps turning.
Despite atrophy in routine
and the absence of you;
that deficit I cannot absolve
when left alone in its entirety.

Love arrived once I wrote it off
as a folly of forsaken selves;
freedom reduced to paranoid glances
at inactive screens.
I am ready for pain again,
if you are the one delivering it.

Finding a living is so hard,
so difficult to sustain
without a reason to sustain it.
Beyond personal dreams
and a need for greed.

An ocean of eyes follow me
through the working day
until I crave isolation.
Only to stumble into
my blank-walled retreat
and realise what isolation really means.

What happened to our potential love?
I cannot read your last letter,
too scared to hear
that you hold a happiness
that bears absolutely
no reliance on me.

You found our distance
lost its charm. You have him,
with his immediacy
and a history to draw upon,
to justify.
I am a teenage folly,
left in the scrap of old photographs
and even older emotion.

A disused, defunct muscle
left to atrophy
as you find your comfort
and your way in life.
But you are a stray, a stray
with the desire
to be led astray;
with the want for a longing.

You know I can fill your days with poetry,
your bed with flame,
your winters with heat.

I have been living on a diet
of cigarettes and digestive biscuits.
My bowels empty into the System
and my hunger concedes
to the supermarket glow;
bigger names
under surgical lights.

The operation was not successful.
You can see it in the grey faces,
upturned collars;
that manic headphone stare.
The lone smoker skulks a bus-stop
like angry eczema
on a bride's upper lip.

I see it for myself now.
How crowds congregate by light,
stamens of fat and sachets of salt,
then separate as sadness
cuts through the delusion;
working poverty and panic attacks
on the hard kitchen floor.

The ache of anxiety
caught up with you again.
Self-imposed catastrophes pile up
as you find yourself walking against
the grain of lunatics passing your way.
The pupae gather and slaver
at their freedom;

you broke through The Promise.
I followed the path of your recovery.

I have voices in my head.
sometimes they are mine and sometimes they are that girl walking down the street without a hat or a home address and I know this because I know things without knowing them.
there is hurt here, in this car full of silver and new and no smoking or I'll rip your fingers off.
my mother knows how to say amen like she's still dedicated to the Catholic Church I tell her, you should have given that up the day they refused to baptize me.
everyone sees dark in me where there is none.
I was a baby and I was a baby and I'm still a baby, or I wish I was.
I'm a baby who cries and says good morning every day even if it's not.
I say good morning when I wake up after missing dinner
I refuse to touch China now
my hands don't listen to the voices in my head all they think is break break break and the break break break sounds itself like cracking open and I need to lobotomize the dishes in here before she gets sentimental about handing them down to me when I finally find someone who isn't scared of waking up beside me to find my throat slashed
here it is. truth, because there is no right or wrong there is truth.
and truth sets you free.
it sets you free and it has you without a hat or a home address and you still wonder why nobody sends you letters back.
you say they forget your name. Or your middle name but it doesn't matter.
I only answer to "baby girl, do you want me to call the doctor for you?"

and i started to choke, not from the smoke of the cigarettes you seemed to love more than me, but from the decay of the flowers you left in my lungs and forgot to water.

and i couldn't see anything, tripping over those hollow words you said three months ago, trying to grasp some root or branch or some last string of love you could have for me.

my body hit the current


(cjw)