Don't you remember when the embers of the fire we burned
Tended to lend their distended heat to our dismembered concerns
About guilt the in the darkness past the attractive flames
That we built a stark distraction reactive to the shame
Of the past and the last active claim of aghast blame
For tame transgressions with vast, intercessive aims
It's not a game
I make no claim
to understand the rules of an impressive refrain on expressing pain
I've always been **** at making real appealing fires
So I gave it to you to take your ideals and desires
And make something that burned brighter and higher
Than anything our nights could ever really earn or require
But the wind had called a favour in
And winter walled that labour in
And so flames buffered and suffered
Fluttering, stuttered, they were scuppered
The ashes of our confidence now paper thin
Unreliable light will let the darkness in
It offers the undesirable, heartless spin
On this starless night we're tiring in
We can build it back up but the conditions are tough
In the build up to an admission that enough is enough
We always could give up and freeze to death still kissing in the underbrush
With Failure's frost seizing our last wistful breaths
and Hope's ghost leaving us to a listless Death
Heavy with regrets gasping a dismissed homesick song
I'm not ready for that yet, let's risk throwing another stick on
I want the heat and the light to cheat on the night
To melt the meat from my cheeks and let my heart ignite
So tonight let's reach a heat to set the past alight

He lived in a room with no windows
He hung pictures on the wall
Of driveways, cars and hedgerows
Of redbrick homes and even a town hall

But soon he began to miss a view
That offered some variety
Nothing breathed and nothing grew
At the centre of his dead society

So he moved a couple in next door
And an accountant the other side
An old lady got the house with the green front door
A large family had the garden with the slide

The postman liked to come at noon
A bus passed on the hour
He saw children playing in the afternoons
And lawns brighten under spring showers

It didn’t exist beyond his doors
This idyllic, sunny street
But now that he had some neighbours
His new home felt complete

But like all things of beauty
The cracks began to show
Reality likes to exercise duty
Down to the smallest bungalow


One day the silver car was missing
And, when watching the road for more
He the saw the man next door was kissing,
Mrs Across the Road, not Mrs Next Door

A while later, there came the shouts
And the gasps of laboured crying
The street knew what the row was about
And so Mrs Across the Road was caught lying

The kids were put in the car, confused
Bras were strewn across the front lawn
She begged him to stay but he refused
And an ambulance was there by dawn

Mrs Across the Road was dead
They found her hanging from the ceiling
And Mrs Next Door had a cut on her head
That gave him a queasy feeling

Vandals came, the police followed
The old lady’s front windows were broken
The had tulips wilted and the people wallowed
He watched the decay, alone and heartbroken

He decided to move away from this street
The sobbing through the walls plagued his evenings
A new set of windows, new neighbours to meet
The real world could be conquered by leaving


But when moving day came, and he arrived
He felt suddenly much less sure
When he noticed that, well and revived
Mrs Across the Road living next door

From then, wherever he went they came
His neighbours’ rows and cries were haunting
He moved some more, but it was always the same
His world was inescapable, the fiction taunting

Eventually, his patience snapped
Which led him to a more physical hell
Windowless once again, he could never adapt
To the bars on the door to his cell

Those days were the idle ease of clouds  
Those mornings breathed
The nights hummed
Vibrations of existence
And the anticipation of dawn
Until time began to wail
Unmistakable
and inconsiderate
The stark countenance of responsibility
Sidled around the curtains
Immediacy stopped consistency
Reality burst forth from the boxes
We could never quite seal
The uncontained became contaminated
Leaves turned brown
Minutes turned grey
The solace of the night suffocated itself
And drowned our plans in silence

Dawns barbed tongue
Licked regret off my face
And finally
It seemed as though the four corners of the world
Were finally coming home

I gasped but only your voice went in
After the lies I'd told like magic
Emptied themselves as marbles
On the hard wooden floor
I collected myself
With my hands
Dropping the hope
I had been holding on to
Ambiguity ripped open
A line between my heart and chin
I gasped and only the truth went in

Those stars you see are dead
Only blackness there instead
Sights that enlight hearts and heads
Are finite delights we misread

And those TV shows and media spiel
They're real profits for fake ideals
Our lives are dull, at worst ordeals
And to appeal to the way humans can feel
Cuts the thickest, if slickest, business deal

So we divide ourselves into groups and sides
Find the one that best describes what's 'inside'
Who we are is defined by who we stand beside
With as much control of the pride or snide chides implied
As we have over landslides or mountainsides or the tides

In the age of the original, the individual
We shun the biblical, the ritual, the miracle
And turn to the visual,
A new kind of digital Fictional
Where the  miserable are invisible
The political are cynical
The habitual criminals reciprocal
And the principles hypocritical

Those stars you see are dead
That's what the phycisist said
Even sky has us misled
When the truth that's spreaded is dreaded
The truth we bred is embedded
The easily read are easily led

Mouse claws on plastic; a scratching sound,
A small pallid face on a merry-go-round,
The wheel trundles on unstable ground
As the empire falls, a fresh king is crowned

Head spinning; hair thinning,
Revolution by minute is no beginning,
And now the man behind the lattice is sinning,
It goes around, and around
Swinging, we come around

Mornings follow familiar dreams
Afternoons clink with routine and caffeine
Evening curtains rise to the same static scenes,
And night rings out the strain of the machine
Round and around
Evergreen; never aground

Our scratches on the wheel grow loud now
Two more eyes swallowed by the shuffling crowd now
Despite strain, the steel walls unbowed somehow
By a thousand pallid faces beneath a thousand sallow shrouds
We go around, and we go around
The mice remain humble: the king has some proud vow
It comes around and back around
The world keeps turning; we all fall down

I'm dreading a red Christmas
Just like the ones that used to flow
Where my thigh-tops glisten
And tampons I christen
With the blood from my pink grotto

I'm dreading a red Christmas
With every Christmas cramp I fight
May the clots be unscary and slight
And may all the periods be light

I'm dreading a red Christmas
With each sheet I stain at night
May the flow be wary and finite
And may all the periods be light

When you opened my mind
Alongside my knees
I thought I was a book of kinds
Some volume you would read
Perhaps even thoroughly
Unhurriedly
Or intimately
But ultimately
It came to seem
That referencing is all you need
Searching for a flair or look
A certain way of speaking
Honestly, in my book
It's merely vain traits you're seeking
A written list for your esteem
Or footnotes for or your story
Because surely
You know how sorely
Paper cuts
Come from paper *****
Tight and gory

The kindness in the tides:
a lie
We drowned before we swam
Things that wash up on the sand
Now perfectly brown
and bland
While the same sand in timeglasses
Squabbles over which was last
or fastest
The earth divorces
Down main roads and golf courses
Leaving trees and tees and work forces
To decide custody and resources
Mud slides, fires, floods
Wars, bloodshed and more shed blood
We breath and undo the work of her trees
Pollute the air further and curse the disease
Build up, drill down
Stitch flags, forge crowns
Blast off, touch down
And wonder why the moon frowns
She will take all of us back
Piece by person by piece
In thise messy Natural attacks
To reclaim the beast of her autonomy back
Gravity languid but abound
We are tethered to the ground
And so too the fate She will propound
Indeed we are indebted
Regret it

Thanks to you
At dawn
there was a snippet of sky on the pillow
And half the earth spread across closed curtains
Silently,
By night
You eradicated the other half
Entirely
And, like eradicating dust
Or memory
What was left was surreal
And wavered
A horizon viewed through flames
What began shook ferociously
Determined
and unmuddied
By the dust that lies beyond closed curtains
Or the ash beneath the flames

I made the walls my best friends
I told them my secrets
I shared myself
And I always listened
Until finding myself loyal to nothing else
I invited you to share their insides
In the hope of a breathing connection
But now instead I whisper with them
Behind noise or doors or duvets
Those words never said in your breath
Silence snaps when you shut the door
Magnolia reacts mildly
And sometimes breathing is intense

My heart is a desolate castle
Upon a lonely, haunted hill
Its self grandeur misguided and facile
Empty yet infestation fills
rooms that beat in theory
but in abandonment seem still
Oh, my heart is a desolate castle
Haunted by its own free wil

Come into my arms
I’m stronger than I look
I’ll keep you safe
Hold your frame
Mutter incompletes into your hair
And when the time comes
The falling of the ceiling
Or the raining of the flames
I’ll cover you in me
Weave my fingers into yours
Press my heart into your veins
Come into my arms
I’ll keep you safe

Look at me
Smile
Affirm me

****

I disgust myself

Meet me at dusk by the shore
Through lips dripping in salt water
We will whisper wet words
You can try and break the surface
I can try and glisten blurred eyes
We can sway against white waves
Or rock against darkening stone
Before the sky grows and you
Take me back to your grey cave
Where I’ll come staggering and pulling
The seaweed from my body
And you brush the sand from your eyelashes
We can swim
You can wash me slowly
In that rhythmic salinity
I can gasp for air
But I hope you will drown me
So we can wash up for the dawn
I will meet you where you leave me
On the shore

I sleep alone
Tonight
But when again my eyes gain sight
You’re there
Snowfall in the night
Lashes laid together
Untrodden white
Nearing forever
Fills my eyes
Fills my insides up
Like a child’s
Desiring outside
Each sleep sounded sigh
See
With you I need
To be
Thrown on my knees
Face to the sky
Hot smile in a cold breeze
With my
Tongue ready
And arms high
Breath heavy
Feeling flakes to my skin
That make something within
Scream for more and for less
And give in
That frozen magic to play in,
Foray in,
To lay in,
To pray I can stay in
But on the pillow,
There’s no way to begin
So
Laying
Instead
I take to your chest
Using your arms
Your hair
To cover the rest
My reality I wrap in
A blanket of your mapping
Frosted fingers lapping
At the edges of your chapped skin
Snowfall in the night
Stranded at the right site
With soft breath on my head
I’m almost outside in our bed
Flaked sorcery sheds
Overnight
Before me
Untouched white
And
Behind me
Life’s entirety
Out of mind
And
Out of sight
Backs to reality
Face in the sky

I think we forgot
Or I think there was an occurrence
A time that the door swung open
Where it slipped, almost quietly out
Fell up into the night
For others, perhaps
Or for nothing

Or maybe
Between those days, streets, dinners
Those afternoons thieved behind closed curtains
Between the hands and the highs and the denials
In those lulls of mind, or lacunas of the trials
We forgot to look
Unrepentantly inattentive
And like a naughty child
Like yesterday's confetti to a storm  
It fled
And we,
Indispensably inattentive
Rolled forward
Smooth wheels on rough ground
But maybe it didn't
Didn't flee after all
And we merely
Rolled forward
Rolled towards

Do I scream from the windows?
Or replant, in the same plant ***?
Do I pound my thighs along lanes after it
With all that naughtiness
Of the troubled child?
I wonder if this is the sentence
For the crime of easy reliance
I wonder if belated repentance
Can push palms into the past
I wonder if tomorrow
Changes's hurricane arrives

Out of the dark and into my dreams
Through the haze, not quite as it seems
Out of the dark and into the depth
Candidness abandoned, and honesty kept

Out of the end and into the dark
Bottomless as oceans, still as this heart
Out of lit tunnels, into that dark
I left myself at the gateway, ineluctably apart

Out of myself and into the air
Insides roaming, body spare

The mirror said things I'd never dare
I knelt before its connoting stare
I stiffened my spine and smoothed my hair
In deference to its malverse glare
But, with no choice in what to share
All I face is a weak despair
And an unreflected world to compare
Unaware and unfair
A scared affair
When it's me, in disrepair,  who kneels
Neither here nor there

There's an alteration here
The lights soften
They reach out to touch themselves
Paper covers rock
Concepts always just collected in the spaces
That actions
and words found between warm breaths
had already etched
I thought I knew but I didn't

The sun was too bright
The air too wet
I wandered too far
And so desolation went unnoticed
Until the first dark flash
Until thunder startled frosted eyes
The path has gone and the rain is coming
I thought I knew but I didn't

Perfect apple, perfect day
Perfect fit to perfunctory palm
The shine is shared with blinded gaze
The blood doesn't rub off until the bite
I couldn't see stains in my stubborn smile
I couldn't see the trees for the wood
I couldn't see the moss for the furniture  
I thought I knew but I didn't

I was occupied
Neatly cutting up the patches
Arranging them, so they might work
Weaving a display of correctness
Shearing this covering
Trimming the edges, neatening the detail  
Rock smashes scissors
Patches don't work
I thought I knew but I didn't

The crack in the windscreen was deafening
There's rope burns in our hands
Discarded skins and shells hang between the floorboards
Breastplates can splinter
We thought we knew but we didn't

The pictures swell in my mouth
Taste has always been
The most inexplicable of sensations
But I can taste a few smiles
And afternoon sunrays finding their way past the blades of grass to my face
I taste the freshness that came with the speed
Of a polluted river
fictional and familiar
Change tasted exotic
Change changed and curdled
I can taste long twilights and the flies that lived there
I taste the profile of your face
After so much time, I struggle to get the full flavour of that temper
Or the depth of despair to the palette
But I'm learning more and more
That those are pictures
Quietly swelling
Somewhere in the throat

Come back rain*
Or is this fallacy pathetic enough already?

The *** of rot
I've been simmering
Was embroiled to the boil
You tried to remove the heat
And appallingly scalded
Your chest and face
As my
Water supplies are
Surprisingly small
I have little to go on
but potluck
and recall

-02:36
******* then

Drunk and its 1:39
I told you I love you tonight
The first time
It's drunk and it's arguing and I'm 1:39
Love, can we grapple back this time
I feel sick and I've risked and its 1:39
You're not coming back in time

Love, it's 1:59 this time
You haven't grappled back for mine
1:59, no sign
I love you
And every minute inclines
Love,  at 2:05
Let's realign
Love, 2:05, is fine
Now enshrined
Assigned

I still can't give away
my heart without my pride

two twenty-one
where have you gone
master of  all tides
my sole, myself I sit beside

two twenty-two
where are you
avenger of mind
wound up, unwound, unwind

two twenty-three
the places you could be
sensor of life's lives
free fall, free form, free ride

two twenty- four
myself at the door
pretender the unwise*
chasing, chanting life's guise

I say that I am fine
You reply
I know
I say that it doesn't really matter
And you don't reply
I go
It doesn't really matter
I go
It doesn't matter at all
You don't go
Anything
At all

I say I'm fine
You say that you know
But
Your concern is
Is fine
Although, I go
Don't concern yourself with nothing
I go
Don't concern yourself at all
And you
Don't go
Anywhere
At all

Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day
But I don't feel very clean
Because you can wash the outside
But even in 2015
Even in these realms of gender equality
And liberty on how to be sanitary
There's no solution for
internal Hygiene
And my blood that's not blood
This muddy flood more than ******
Is somehow still obscene

Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day
Today is a day I am 'on'
The switch is flicked
Blood engaged
And desirability gone
A secret leak, girls so meek
Whisper requests to friends
For dry bleached cotton to stuff and to mend
A recurring trend of defence and anxious bends
To stop the sprawling reddish brownish stain
Of the unexplained fertile woman shame

Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day
Girls in this world are dying and sick
This day promotes an unfortunate fix
Of our wealthy model that still prefers *****
That shows ***** on screens but never female produce
That allows 'I have a cold' but not 'I'm losing some ******'  
'feminine hygeine' aisles,
not 'period supplies' or 'Menstruals'
Disguised packets essential,
to store myself in,
Yet I've never glimpsed the contents of a sanitary bin,

It's Menstrual Hygeine Day
I hygienically ******* today
So I don't understand why this man
Will feel me on his chin and hands
But when the calendar strikes four
It doesn't do it anymore
I'm on and your off
I'm on and turning on stops  
Between my legs this mess
These dregs of last month make me less
Than my best or even a success
At being a woman despite my *******
And my fully functioning, leaking flesh
The appeal is repealed when you feel some real feels
And I continue to walk without showing pain  
To avoid any questions I cannot sustain

Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day
I take my pills for my mahogany strain
I didnt realise from my first stain
What was normal for bloodshed and symptoms and pain,
My packets talk in grams and the doctors in millilitres
My bedsheets spoke volumes and mattress screamed deeper
My knickers whispered ****** and my thighs of a foetus
Stressed and grievous
I don't live in Nepal, I'm lucky for my resources
And the understanding nature of modern social forces
You haven't  degradated or segrated this hateful female fate starting
But I'm far from delighted with the slight common sense parting
When I've seen these secret unfair truths
As normal until there's something compare to
Why do we teach shame and silence
For another simple act of natural violence?
Why will you handle dirt and dead meat,
But not a person alive and craving your heat
And I am sick of my flowers  and unclean until the even
Of my life and one quarter of my natural season

Today is Menstrual Hygiene Day
But I don't feel very clean
Because I've washed and washed the outside
But there's blood all down the seams

Stop telling the kids
That what you do is who you are
Stop telling the kids
That your work is the mark
Stop asking the kids
What do you want to be?
Or- start accepting answers of
‘Nice’ or ‘safe’ or ‘happy’
Stop telling the kids
What they want to do
Is who they want to be
You’ve confused the English
A verb where an adjective should be
Stop telling the kids
How they serve the economy
Is the same as their personalities
How will you make money for someone else
In your lifelong campaign to sustain yourself?
Is this what we ask at the age of three,
To know how to act socially acceptably?
Save the inaccurate labels of ability
For dinner parties and PTA meetings
And ask the kids
What kind of grown-up do you want to be
Or better, what would you like to see?
What’s it like being three and what do you dream?
What should I want to be?

In a dire little spire's shadow
A form pitters, admires a sad show
A girl of the world waits on the drab stone
Waits to unfurl the curl of her mad bones

Hurrying the boldness
To give those bones flight
Into the noblest
Last act of performance night
or exercise in masked spite
Irrelevant, an embellished fate
She crouches, contemplates
The height, the likely injurious spate
The form flounces around the wait

This **** of this morning
Almost hawk of forlorn dawning
Sures it's tastes, titillates
Red shine in the eye reflects
Mind's highs and shy delections
Foreseeing shards of residual head spread
Over acutely angled limbs
and digits subtracted and mangled

To no surprise she rises
It sizes up the prize that provided
An answer to lies so hideously divided
And a thirst for the worst that insidious lives wish
Saviour of absent behaviour
No try, no cry, no mind for saving her
A foot left the paving, the body flailing
Regaining
On gravity and the audacity
Of life's magnanimous, massive, flaccid needs
A sound of pained muddle hounds the cease
Years regain in puddles on the dusty concrete
A prayer said alone from a just, husky tree

***** and undetected
The monster's expected scorn ejected
He moves now towards the poor unsuspecting's rejected
Silhouette of chance and dances dankly in his delected
Tragedy of red majesty and death's rich tapestry perfected

I could be some relief
To Fantasy in chief
Commanding ships spur
And all who sail in her
I could twist and dismiss and insist
I could enlist opposition to resist what now exists
But I could not try
And inspire any real reaped desire
Only brusque verse or something wrier
I could not slink and hint and smoulder
I now think what I would evince is far colder
No feminine wiles
Just the end of the smiles
And the bell  of reality's child
Sounding loud to astound a man
Resiled from the myth of desires plans
Would a reflection of your own ***** affections
Of lip curled, showing familiar perfection
Of a tone deep, making lone directions
Be to Fantasy's fan planned infection?
Or does the candle light these perceived shames,
Setting the secret world of 'wanting' aflame?

Crouching demon on my bed
Flouting reason, bringing dread
Crouching demon of yesterday's me
Vouching freedom for shamed crazy
If you had eyes they'd surely shine
But to some surprise I merely find
Instead of sections of fear and fire
A gaunt reflection of my reared desire
Crouching demon, don't choose me
I fling freedom at a bruise I call envy

Do not decline
To design
The time-line
Of my mind

Do not agree
To foresee
A degree
Of debris

Just decide
To subside
At my allied
Beside

Form on that jet-ski
Your messing with my horizon
And I can't avoid wandering how the water copes
Under your vibrations
Pumps and peaks of power
Like a plane
Or a mower
Or a heavy drill
Or any other human smear
On a human view of tranquil

You used your strength
And your arms
To destroy the final space
That fell between you
And me

And in a depth of my chest
It felt like a sheet of snow
Had slipped over a roof edge
And silently fallen
On snow below

Today: A Paperclip
Continuously and seamlessly complementing and complying with myself
Bending solely to hold something foreign as whole
With a surety of security
And right angled refine

Unless the load is too much or too smooth or not right
And in leaning the lines some part
Or some whole
Sideways makes escape
From skewed hold
Shiny soundness
Will surely soften
And the Paperclip appeal will reveal
To be as paper thick as any
Continuous and seamless
Paperclip in a Paperclip ***

Maybe tomorrow warrants
The hopeful and overly capable Staple.

Pushed to pillow
This morning
With musty dusted eyes
Your face was soft all over
But by lunchtime
It's all corners
And by nightfall
I'm petitioned with bruises