You can sit with your shame and you can sit and sit and sit
And you can let yourself climb down into the coldest depths where you think you belong
And you can bargain and promise
And plead that you’ll do better
That you know what you did
That you’re not like the others
Or you can let it go on the breeze on your knowing
Bet it all on the little brown nut of your love for yourself
And realise that it wasn’t you all along
That you’re good
Oh you’re good you’re good you’re good
And sleep,
with the comfort of your own choices.

And I loved a girl once
From the same place as this band I like
I hear her sweet missives in the angsty twang of their songs
And when someone talks of New York
I picture her running about the streets
Before she knew me
Breathtaken in the easy newness of it all
And when I think of southern England
I think of the trip we took to the coast
Her bright eyes leading me from London
Hands steady on the wheel and my thigh
And I can’t visit the town of my youth
Crochet myself through the crowds on Cowley road
Without looking for her by the house she used to live in
I see her body pushing mine into the red brick of the Middle Eastern takeway
On that warm night in April when she first showed me her longing.
And often when I'm in Clapham
Driving past the couples walking slowly in the grey snowed-grass
I’m haunted by the common, dusty with bottle tops
and the smell of smoking
Light august rain as she cried at my swollen tears

Can’t stop
feeling the shape of people
Trying to see if they will fit
Into the space I cultivated
Just for you

Low tide
I wait and I wait
You enter me
In dreams
I can’t scrub the smell of you
My head

She breathes into me
inhales deep
and relaxes back
and I think she might just be the greatest thing
That I've ever had.
fears others all
do not exist
Only her.

I have made friends with the birds nesting above me
In my nights alone
When I am full of you
They murmur along
Nodding at the right parts
As I retell myself the story of us.

Our love was secret
I delighted at the hidden bits of you
that you were entrusting me with
We swallowed sunsets and mornings
Days of messages and small smiles
orbits speeding as we circled one another