I put on my dress and smooth the creases under my eyes.
It just falls right, falls right on the curves of my hips
And hides the shadows between this rib caged heart.
For that moment, it reminds me less of myself
And more of you.

Do not run from the sun, the bluebird said,
Your feet will unravel, leaving nothing but thread.

Then lend me your wings , she said in reply,
And we'll fly to a place where the shadows don't lie.

The fragility of female flesh,
The feminine depth within each pore
Hides a deep havoc beneath glowing embers,
A storm man fears and calls a *****.

Don't use your words to build me a wall
As I am the foundation on which it will fall.

Whispers and rings
you promise to bring,
that is what our love is made of.
Whips and wails
and back scratching nails,
that is what our lust is made of.

She was an ordinary girl.
Plaits beside a waistline she drew on with ribbon,
Fastening her thoughts she'd sworn to keep hidden.

Behind closed doors she would loosen the noose
Man ******* before her,
And bind up her lover
The milkman's daughter.

Lying beside the safety blanket of an open fire
You ask me why I am scared of the CD player.
A question no one dared to ask,
As if asking was like the warmth that
Would unravel me bare skinned
Limbs against floor boards
Revealing the things I hoard under
The loose fabric of a summer dress.

I confess to you them parts of me
You would never see unless you
Asked that single question.

I bite my lip, the tip of my tongue
Hoping it can charade its way out
Of these words, these words
I have been trying to drown,
to sink with sips of sauvignon blanc
Till I had dried the glass of myself clean, empty.

I bite my lip.

His eyes were like silver discs,
Scratched on the surface
Playing nothing but broken records
So no one could hear the fear inside my chest.
The melody of his muse would ring through my veins
so I shut my eyes,
Opened my thighs and I bit my lip
Drawing blood to my tastehah buds
To forget the thuds of his open palm
So no harm would come to me
If I forget to see, forget to breathe
Each night I would cry to the wake of the morning,
hoping tomorrow would never come.
For some, darkness is safer than light.

It wasn’t how they told me it would happen.
Slow, sober, a blur of moments
Woven together into a noose that would
Hang out my hope on the thread of a rope
And it wasn’t how they told me it would happen.
That I would go back to him when the darkness came.
That I would know it would always be the same
But I would never be the same again
He locked me in the closet for 6 hours,
Hands bound, mouth taped shut
And I never thought I would pray to stay locked away
I have never been so afraid
Waiting for the door to open to two discs
Reflecting the fear that was living in my heart.

I don’t know where to start.
Fear is an emotion that can scare you
to silence the secrets wrapped up in your lies
Beside the tears you keep in a jar for no one to see.
What is that bruise?
I fell in the shower.
Why are you bleeding?
Mother nature
Why are you not eating?
Im eating later
Why are you limping?
I am struggling to stand myself in the mirror
Can’t you see I am starving myself thinner and thinner
So please guess what is happening beneath this dress
My womb is ***** empty,
There is nothing left inside me to fill
Nothing left that is real
Can’t you see I am trying to **** myself before he does?

You ask me why I never told you.
I bite my lip-
This poem has been hidden beneath the
Smile I now wear, under my tongue
Within my lungs, inside my fingertips
That itch to write the truth
But I know if I say these words,
Unseal my lips, this story is real.
Tracing the lines he left on my body
I know he’s telling me to not pick up the pen
And that is exactly why I have picked up my pen.

I don’t want to condemn the people who ****,
Who try to escape the law
With threats to their victims
Hidden beneath words disguised as love
I don’t see myself as a victim anymore.
Him. He. That man. That boy.
He isn’t me.
I cannot blame myself for what happened.
You cannot blame yourself for what happened
Between closed doors, open alleys,
The bedroom in your own home
With your parents on the same floor.
People ask me why I am scarred
And I say these are not scars
These are my battle wounds
From a fight I thought I lost,
From a life I thought I tossed aside
From a time when I didn’t know if I was even alive anymore.
I didn’t survive, I am tired of being told
I am lucky to be alive to survive to be normal
The sad thing is, this is what is becoming normal
for too many women and men
and when are we going to make it stop?
Stop is a word so many know too well.

My ****** still lives in my bones.
He’s made it his home to roam,
To decorate and play the same song
Each night over and over and over.
I never invited him in.
I couldn’t escape my ****
But maybe it could have been prevented
If we teach our children what it means to have consented
That consent cannot be confused with silence
Why are children still not being taught
That ****** violence should never be silenced?
Instead of questioning what I was wearing
We need to start caring that 1 in 6 are sexually abused,
we have got used to a culture where we remove
a persons right to question whether this is normal.
This is not normal.
This is never normal.

When are we all going to stand up and say stop.
We need to stand up and say stop.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2q3IPH7SE0

Do not touch yourself.
Your body is not yours to claim,
Reign in your securities
And tie them to the bedpost
A notch that your crotch will never

Remember,

Do not try to regain
The strength to stand up tall,
It only gives you a place to fall from.
If you hold your head up high
People will start looking what is inside.

Remember.

Only let others touch which is yours.
Now open your legs for a round of applause.

The dolls house was an escape exist masquerading as child's play,
Emerald curtains open for all the neighbours to see.
Gentle, delicate, Miss China lays the table rather than in bed,
Spreads the table cloth rather than her legs.
The tea set lies daintily on the table for when he comes home
When her mother plants him a kiss in the garden to grow.
And watching the car park on the fading lawn
She wonders if window panes feel happiness at all.

I spent my nights reading books in our greatest libraries
Searching for what it is I am still clinging on to,
Then after the final vowel I realised
The one thing I miss about you, is you.

A nun whips me bare and broken
Against a wooden table Jesus once ate upon.
"Beg for forgiveness"
I get on my knees
and thank God for what I
am about to eat.

Alice sits beside the looking glass and touches her reflection
Breaking down beside the girl she cannot see is perfection.

Suitcases aren't made for dresses and skirts or any such thing,
They are another type of box they try to trap you within.

Scientists estimate that you will fall in love seven times before you get married.
That 42% of these marriages will end in divorce.
That lesbians get their sexuality from their fathers inability to
Maintain a platonic relationship with a woman
Pram pushing into bedrooms whilst our mothers clean
With wine stained pinafores and nicotine laced lips.
They remove their motherhood camise
And hang it on the banister one day after school,
Her fatal attraction to the bottle and mine to the silk touch of a woman’s fabric being the perfect childhood cliché for a
chronic homosexual.

My mothers is still there like a scare crow to heterosexuality,
warning off all my seven deadly loves that could have come from man but now come from the caress of a woman’s cheek but still,
I am afraid of wearing my heart on my sleeve
In case I shrink it in the wash so I place it in my rib cage
Captive to the beat of my own heart grieving.

You are my second love and according to science
I am therefore chasing something that cannot be caught,
Something that has an expiry date before I can even co-create this thing called love  

So when I sip seduction from your navel,
When I unwrap you like the present at Christmas I never got,
Untying the ribbon as I undo your jeans,
Just know the only I do I will say is when you ask me if I think you look pretty.
Or if I want a brew when we are lying in bed puffing smoke rings
Around our impending sighs that float over us like rainclouds,
Drips of fate falling from these skies dampening my desire.

So forgive me if the only aisle I will see you up is the biscuit aisle, Pulling the fabric of my non-wedding dress around my slipping tights.
Forgive me if I trade in the sweat on your neck
For the salt side of a tequila
As sometimes I like to use the wool from over my eyes to knit me telescope so I can look at the stars between your thighs,
But what no one ever tells you is that when you wish upon a star,
That star has surely died.
  
Because I want to fall in and out of love 7 times.
Correction: I want to fall in and out of love with you 7 times.
I want to press you, not in a book, but against me.
Imprint the lines of your fingertips on my ******* like maps of Atlantis because I want to go places with you I never knew existed.
I want your nails engraved on my back like constellations of stars
So I can always find my way back to now. To then.
The present. The past. That very moment where Greenwich meantime got it wrong:
Those seconds were longer than any before,
And my life has been full of seconds.
Second child. Second best. Second chances. Second love.
The third the forth, the fifth the sixth but the 7th, the 7th time you tell me is no longer reserved for you.

You tell me the 7th time is for me to fall inexplicably, uncontrollably in love with myself.
So when I walk myself up a different kind of aisle I can do it with you by my side.
And I’ll stand there, lifting the veil from over my eyes and I will tell you, Darling, second love, science is colourblind.
It doesn’t see the colours of the rainbow like I do.

Because yes, I do.

She told me I was her favourite cologne,
The kind you wear on special occasions.
Soon my glass began to wear thin
And I realised, you cannot own what I have from within.

Turn me over like your favourite novel.
Run your fingers along my spine.
Bite your lip at your favourite parts
Then read between my lines.

Candy canes made her lips wet, sweetened with the thought of trips to the seaside and her pleasure in pain

You broke my heart
And still I gave a piece of it to you freely,
Leaving me like a jigsaw puzzle
No one could ever truly complete.

You tell me to grow a pear
Just so I can put the fruit between my lips and eat it.

You asked for the world
So I gave you a mirror
And if I could not say this any clearer,
*darling you are my world
Your gravity pulls me nearer.

"I am not ok", she said,
"Two letters cannot possibly explain
The pain that resides in my heart.
There is not enough ink to begin
Describing what is within.
Find me a word that is real".

Petals drifted through our garden, and rested on her toes.
Sprigs of rosemary waltzed in the wind
and time captured the orange peel of her hair with perfection, a memory kept hidden in the pocket of my jeans.
The air had embraced indigo violets,
their scent imprinted on the collar of the breeze.
I get to my knees and hold the stalk of a forget-me-not,
And whisper she loves me,
She loves me not.

She filed her dreams in alphabetical order,
Wiping the dust from her minimalist future.
She boxed them up and piled them high,
Shrinking them to match her thighs
And the looking glass began to lie each night
Telling her the weight of her dreams
Was too heavy to fight.

I gave you my word,
Wrapped it up in cellophane so it would never lose meaning,
Enveloped in the kitchen draw where you placed for safe keeping.
And now when you read my poems with another preserving your touch
You'll realise you had all my words-
One was not enough.

She was a girl no one could understand.
Her body was her voice
And she was screaming for someone to hear
The unwept tears that were caged by that night,
When she learnt stillness after the storm
Was the earths brave face mourning
What was lost in the fight.

She folded me up like origami, turning something used into something beautiful
And smoothing out the creases of my geometric heart she kissed goodbye the girl she called art.

There are empty pages that yearn for ink describing her loving caress.
There are empty beds that beg for the arch of her lower back.
I know which one I would rather fill.

When she bent over to plant a kiss on parted lips
Her red hair fell and rested on my hips,
And as I prayed this moment would never stop
She whispered, "darling, I am the cherry on top".