The crashing of the waves
Reminds me of my head
Hitting the wall
After I've told myself
A million times
'I can't love you I can't love you'
And the wind
Slapping my face
Reminds me of how I felt
When I watched you walk away
For the last time
And it's your voice
Echoing along the cliff's edge
'Jump jump'.

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

Have mercy on this body,
it is learning to bend and shape,
but creaks and occasionally splits,
releases sighs from spinal aches,
the vertebrae laying lifeless, loving you so,
whispering of lip marks but no teeth,
sunsets but no rises, a bed but no you.
These aches are old, I know,
these aches are tired, I'm sorry,
this skin is a poem and
I leave unedited drafts of myself
in every bed
that has ever held me,
ever fractured me with metaphor,
abandoned with a half-cocked heart.

Take my bullets out.
Have mercy.

i saw you outside
on my roof tonight
with your messy hair
and cigarette glowing
between your fingertips and
you wouldn’t leave but
you wouldn’t come in
and i kept staring as you
blew puffs of smoke
with your back against my
bedroom window and
i wanted to get up and crawl
outside and sit behind
you and draw pictures on
your back of all the things
i didn’t know how to say but
my blankets felt like lead
so i whispered to my pillow how
much i love you and then
the sun began to rise
and you looked back at me
with ashes beneath your
eyes and i told my pillow
i wish you’d stay
but you didn’t you
never do

Collapsed beautiful,
undefined and sharpened,
collated in the fatality of eyes;
yours.
I am slipping underneath
your eyelids, dust
trapped in kaleidoscope dreams,
Our words match, do we? Do we?
My joints mix between the blue and greys
of your optic landscape,
strengthened enough to resurrect
sunken ships. Submerge thought.
Fallen perfection, put the maps away.
Escape. Blink me out.

That year I dug up too much,
wore rose quartz memories
and stared down too many
sunsets,
felt my edges soften
and become sharp again,
the continuum of freezing
and thawing,
in someone else's hands.

That year I realised that
a name itself
can be a poem,
or a will,
or a sentence,
that mirrors assess damage,
scars resemble time,
and bones are just splintered
pieces of those I miss.

That year I was an opportunity,
a calendar choking on rotting number,
a recycled version of events,
already breathed by someone luckier.