you wanted me to see your gods but i am afraid of heights;
i wanted you to touch mine but you cannot swim

you washed your hair in salt by the shore, smiling
with your cracked-skin lips like a perfect line of stitches

holding my head in your wet wet hands,
and i hadn’t heart to tell you that to me you smelt like death

but i suppose you thought the same of i—
like seaweed in the sun, sand in all my joints; breathless

“i’ll get my sea legs some day,” you said,
sealed beneath a new spring moon

and i just, just hadn’t heart to tell you
how these things always tend to end

1
with each passing day you only grow yet more sickened by your every birth rite; keep your loathing for your *** and your name in a glass full of soil on your bedroom windowsill where the light will bring life before your societally imposed sense of shame can strike it down. you belong in a textbook of the future, a born-astronaut’s biology class.

2
here is somebody else’s name; here is your voice, with the texture of a nimbus cloud; here are your eyes coloured all blue, but a sickly sort, blue like a vein, blue like the wrong side of the sky, and the wrong shape of skull.

3
by the time you wake up, the world has already determined who you are going to be today. randomised generation: you are, you are a girl, you are doe-eyed, you are bitter, you are sweet, you are a puzzle to be solved, a shell to be broken, a wrong to be put right, you are pity’s cygnet under the wing of the mother bird, you are beautiful. you are beautiful. but you want to be ugly.

4
you want to be a blank slate.

it is one week before the scheduled end of days
when i make myself fall in love for the first time
and the last—but that goes without saying
as do my thoughts on how lovely your voice is
when it is not brought to melting under tears
(but when do i ever hear it otherwise?)
or how i do not want to have *** with you
not really, but now the dark is seeping in
and your hands are warmer than mine
and nobody wants to feel alone
at
the end

someday i figure i shall live with you
in a little pastel-pallet house by the sea,
one where the shells are full up to overflow
with the dusty tones of my dead old-lovers
and the gulls leave flowers on our doorstep
after each and every rainfall
(today, tulips: secondhand and sun-dried,
brittle as bone)

someday i figure i shall know how to love you
properly, with no regards to reservation—
someday i will learn how to swim,
and i will forget how to fear
the sound of stirring thunder—
but today the sand is cold and
the sirens tell me to watch my step
and yours too

oh,
i know we’re in it for the long haul now.

1:
it's a monday morning and the sky
is a washed-out steel-wool grey
(pregnant with rainfall, drooling
fruitless little white streaks of cloud)
and as i settle down to sleep
i consider quietly the weight of knowing
there is a high probability that you
do not love me anymore.
there are worse things.
there is you

2:
you have a very bright smile
and it does not burn
when my gut tightens for you
and the sun will not hide its face today
and i cannot see a thing
and i am beginning to forget
how to run

3:
its okay to be afraid
i just wish that i was

in our garden, i am growing
a new universe: one fresh
and clean and golden-sweet;
a world of milk over water
and honey over blood.

it’s not that i am unhappy
here with you! it was never that.
i’m just sick of these old stars,
and this ill-fit skin. so today
i am watching the bluebells bloom
and the ivy unfurl—cutting my hair short
and dreaming of a hundred new eyes,
skin that smells of summer.

this evening i cannot see the sky,
i cannot feel your gentle hands,
i cannot believe all your ghost stories
of a better world, a kinder world:
the impossibility of tomorrow
where everything is fine.

but all the same i will thank you.
i will tell you i love you, and
together then we will go to bed
and as you sleep i will watch
matter begin to seep and spill
through every ceiling crack,
and the sun start to rise,
firework-red,
over a sea of stars.

i am growing a new universe.

here’s the story of how i remember you all wrong:
i’m on the number eleven bus, top deck,
and the hair of the boy right in front
is making me think of your own
—although when i try to recall
how you kept yours
i can’t.
i can’t think of the colour of your eyes
or the length of your fingers,
but i can think of how your arm looked
after you sliced it up to bleeding
that one time,
and i do,
i think til it hurts.
(i used to want to hurt you because
i liked you; now i only want to because i don’t.
but you know i don’t want to give you the wrong idea—)

(here’s the story where you didn’t hurt me:
—the wrong head, the wrong heart,
the wrong number under my name in your phone,
the wrong sound of a nervous little brought-in breath
coming between my teeth
as i roll my fingers over your knuckles,
the wrong airport in the wrong city,
the wrong voice for the first time i say
‘i love you’
to you without a single stumble,
or all the wrong questions to ask.
don’t you?)

and here’s the story of how i miss you all wrong:
i go home and curl up under the bedsheets in the dark
til i forget the precise colour of my eyes
and the exact shape of my hands, too,
and i guess that’s how i win,
just the once.