Sometimes a jolt can stop you.
Like a phantom step that calls for you drive your heels to the ground,
Or a sentence in a book that yanks your gaze back to the beginning,
Heaving and lurching over.

Sometimes I stop,
To take in that I have stopped.
That it has been as few months that I could count on fingers,
The same that have scratched at my insides,
Heaving and lurching over.

Sometimes that same jolt can push you,
Like a static shock from a touch.
And that is why I do not claw, crave, beat or binge,
As I think of you most days, not out of love but as a warning.
For if the shock from your static unmoving self
Had not left me stung and stumbling,
Heaving and lurching,
I would not have ran forward.

*I have been cold inside and out.
I have been clawed and have grown talons in return.
And I was paler than my anaemic self,
Lacking in haemoglobin to burden with rasps of air,
Because my heart was weak and could not push blood to the surface.

But now that the colour has drained from my face,
I can blend into snow.
White, all but for red lipstick,
And apple in hand.
So I know when people have found me
They must have had to stop to look.