Baba. Little Man.
My fluffy beating heart.
So gentle and warm.
Here’s to the day we met and you found a home at my feet, and slept
As I stood, completely overwhelmed.
Cushioning you like a delicate flower in an autumnal wind.
And here’s to the day you first gave me your paw, holding it out like a promise
A vow. To have and to hold.
And here’s to the days we’d lay side by side.
Your head on my chest.
Watching you rise and fall. Little life buoy, bobbing in the sea.
A sanctuary. To keep me afloat.
And here’s to the days you’d gift me a toy.
A symbol of devotion.
A boomerang. To throw and fetch and then never let go.
And here’s to the day I realised the softest souls are the biggest.
And that love is a pool of drool on my knees, or a bunch of fur on my jeans.
It’s a wag of a tail.
Or a lapping tongue to my face like a child licking ice cream.
I’m sorry I left you.
And I’m sorry I didn’t come back to you every day.
And I’m sorry that when you got tired the best thing I could ever do for you was to let you go.
And spend the rest of my life wishing you’d come back.

There you go again,
Dancing across dew drops.
Spinning your sticky shapes into something beautiful and deadly.
But I keep falling into you,
Like a firefly who lost its wings in the wind,
And fell straight into your crooked silk embrace.

Oh how many webs have you spun to feed your hunger?
Your insatiable appetite for devouring my skin and bones.
"Taste me," I scream, snapping off limbs in the struggle.
Feast on my flesh.
Go on, take it all.
I’ll bleed again for you tomorrow.

Letters lodge in my lumpy throat.
So I swallow them back down like the handful of pills my stomach keeps
rejecting.
They too hate darkness and long for escape.
Determined words form and splinter through veins.
Coil and cut.
Barbed, they tear through my bloodstream,
and push up against paper-white skin, like braille you could never read.
Suffocating, the words form a simple question.
Clot my heart and choke to death, or let them flow out through my finger tips onto the many drafts I've bled over?
I fetch my typewriter for another long night.

Head spinning in kaleidoscopic daydreams,
I turn and I turn.
Your tongue traces lines across my skin,
pirouettes and flicks.
I moan the only song we'll ever know.

Needlepoint nails on your bony fingers
scratch against scars,
plays sadness and despair.
Sounds amplify in hollow chest,
echoes in the chambers of my beating heart.

Dance to the record of my broken body.
For tomorrow - just crackles and
silence.

Blue speckled eggs fell from nest,
peppered the pavement with
splintered fragments.
I couldn't bear to see another thing break.
I never thought I could fall apart so easily
until the day I heard my ribs crack and snap like twigs,
my rejected heart forced out onto the floor.
I think of those birds now.
And how you stood there, arms outstretched.

Some safety nets look like hands.
And they hold me together better than my own skin.
But even hands have gaps between the fingers.
And I keep slipping through.
I keep slipping through.

Fingernails claw at porcelain skin.
Furiously they scratch and scour.
Layer after layer I become unstuck.
Unravelled. Undone.
Picked at the seams.

I dig and I dig.
Hoping to find the piece of me you didn't like.
Or the piece of you in me that keeps me awake at night.

Nail on bone, I find ribcage.
I find the remnants of my incarcerated heart.
Too weak to set it free,
I leave it there, barely beating.
Helpless.
Some things should never be unearthed.