There's something beautiful about freckles and blemishes and imperfections before I'm made up in the morning. There's something right about naked in the mirror; flaws and scars and age that accumulates with the years. I am a story to be read. I've got skin like a song.

October, you are made of dust and I am a gun.
I killed men once.
When I lifted her veil I felt all of their features melt into one.
I smiled, it was all your storm in me.

October, you are a briefcase. You are six months long.
Tonight, there are tigers reaching out over my head
and I am your god out dancing on his weekend, say,
would you look at all your glass, bursting at the seams?
Would you ask him if I ever got there? Would you tell me why I keep pulling your explosive from my chest like a name label? Would you explain how metal peels as easy as skin with the right amount of madness?

October, I am no more than your casualties.
I am every sadness they ever said you would be.
Silver hands. I can carry these men but I cannot hold them up.

Mother, I thought I saw you standing there but it was just a bullet trail in the darkness.
I am buried in all of your letters, imprinting the both of us on the backbones of these papers;
they tell me I've become all the keys you sent.

October, you are a ballroom with all that break break break and I am falling but I haven't even left the ground yet.
When I rain down on you remember me, like the first sunset you ever wrapped yourself up in, and when they say
that I was never a stronghold, show them all the letters I tried to write you but never sent,
tell them about how the flesh ripped from my bones and left me a relic,
ask them if they can hear me breathing over all that storm.

October, you are confetti leaves falling under tyres on your wedding day,
and I can't be the light that catches them, I can't tell you that this world will wait long enough for you.
So tonight I am burning my name like it's the last thing I'll ever have.
And when they bring us home in our body bags,
remember that the choices we made were the choices we wanted to make.

October, you are a dust storm, and all your colour's left in me

In 2005 The Piano Man was found wandering the streets of Sheerness in a soaking wet suit and tie
he didn't say a word.
When presented with pad and pen he simply drew a grand piano.
His nurses sat him in front of a beat up old upright
he played for four hours straight;
for four months his hands were the only things to break his silence.

Alexandre Dumas said "man will never be perfect until he learns to create and destroy."
Do you ever think about how Beethoven hacked the legs off his piano so he could feel the sounds he couldn't hear in his head, through his chest?
And Van Gogh heard the sounds his paintings made but kept going until his sanity
was just a memory floating on a distant river under a tired Milky Way.
And you see, like a Gaelic folk song blindness runs red through my family,
so I know it's not much but I'm here, still trying to mould my hands to say the right form of 'I love you'.

And did you know that the human heart beats over 30 million times a year, but we still have a hard time keeping our feet on the ground?
And did you know that the act of breaking in a horse is actually the act of breaking it's back?
Like we can't sit without sitting on broken things.
And did you know that every time a mobile phone sends out a GPS signal a bee loses it's way home, and every bee that doesn't reach it's hive dies?

So on nights when your pulse matches the beat of my favourite song
you don't have to wonder if it's me matching the syncopation of your silence --
and I wonder if you ever found what you were looking for.
And I wonder if you realise that on days you're not here I roll up my sleeves,
count the beats without you,
sit on the backseat and miss you.
And somewhere The Piano Man rolls up his sleeves
creates the Big Bang under his fingertips.
And in 2005 on an April morning in Sheerness, a suited piano man walks straight into the ocean,
begs the current to take him.

I send you a message
a bee loses it's way home.
I send you another
another bee dies.
My chest cavity is a bumble bee crypt,
my tongue a honeyed graveyard.

Another message.
The Big Bang.
The hive.
A suit.
That ocean.
Another back is broken.
Another message is sent.
I fear I am more honeycomb than heart.

To create is to destroy. To destroy is to succeed.
And would you just look at what these piano hands have finally done.

i used to cradle her bleach-cracked hands in mine
and decode the stardust resting within her fingerprints
     up until the day that i lost touch with the art of reading braille
     and she stopped slinging tall-tales for me to fetch
and rest the plot-twist at her feet

often in the post-script
i'd find my train of thought highjacked by the sunlight illuminating the rainbow of earth-tones ablaze
in her frizz-ridden curls
as if she'd been washing her hair with the damaged case of beer
she'd gotten for half-price at liqour depot
     she never did quit drinking
          but neither did i

at least we tried

though sometimes
in the middle of the night when nothing was alright
and we'd barely survived another fight
her face would catch my glance
cast aglow by a flood of lava-lamp light
    
     the sea of freckles resting at the crest of her cheeks
     rose lips perma-pursed in half tilt
     her resting heart-rate so high that i could almost see it
          pirouetting within her chest

it was then that i'd love her best
     amidst the ruins of who we were
     just moments before

In our house I am sin, and you are a window.
In our bedroom I am the rest of the house, I am a countdown from five and you are the lights which turn off, you are a rooftop, you are glowing haze on a nearly distant horizon.
In this house I cannot breathe you in anymore. Our bed is made from your sheet lightning.
In our room, under the bed, there are three square, white boxes.
In the first there is a small wooden elephant.
In the second there is a blank sheet of paper, folded in two.
The third is empty.
In this room I am alone. In this house I am sin. I don't think I'm here.

half orphaned little lady
with a half mended heart
and half opened ears
you are half awake
and half asleep
you are separated into
two halves

the walls are scratched in black
from unknown nails
and mindless knives
you tested the dullness
on an open wrist
and your skin
split
in
half

you missed a spot
on your ***** soul
keep cleaning,
for you've got
an ethereal growing mold
in those dark corners
where no one gazes

For the girl with the bow in brown hair,

            the heat from the upstairs
restaurant cures the street where we walk,
            the freight’s in on the track,
you can tell by the horns,
            I from the diesel smell below the
afternoon clouds, faint above,
            sometimes when we speak a heart rate
somewhere peaks,
            another graph pinned to an office wall
shows this clear,
            sometimes when we talk tense chests
fear the answer you may say,
            the graph strays past paper and onto
those office walls, in red with a palmed
            smudge where you forgot where
the words ended.

            For the girl with the bow in brown hair,
your eyes are theatre-light reflections in twenty-four hour
window panes sat packed neatly off the corner of West 47th
and 7th, for you’re my central Times Square.

I filled your veins with water and wrote you down on white paper so I didn't have to read you back anymore. Girl's got a suicide pact across the pacific and all I can do is taste the dust.
2. There is a certainty in the way your body moves out time with itself when you think too much.
3. You told me you wanted to be a saint but you were too afraid of the sight of god. When you asked what belief tasted of they told you: fresh buttercream and a wasp's sting. We didn't see you for days.
4. There is a certain tension and it only exists between the bends of girl's legs and the concrete which holds them stronger than any arms could.
5. I want to run every cliche by you and watch you hold hands into the night with it instead of me.
6. Some people can be replicated entirely out of candle wax.
7. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE SO ******* SELF AWARE ALL THE TIME. You can't even watch yourself.
8. You know you're a halfway house of cells and who are you to say I can't keep up?
9. Say would you tell me if I was just a little off key?
9. Would you tell me the answers to the questions I never asked?
9. Would you play that evening differently if you could turn back the hands that bind you?
10. I burnt you a bridge and sent you the fire like we could ever fill a room with your god. I want to ask him what he thinks of our sins.
11. There is a fluidity in the way your words turn back on themselves.
11. There is a fluidity in the way you turn back on yourself.
11. There is a fluidity in the way people leave doors open for you.
12. I don't think I'd even know what to say to you if I saw you.
13. I only feel comfortable on even numbers.
13. I guess I made myself an odd number.
13. I don't know what we're left with.
13. This is not how we were supposed to end up.
14. I wish you could see the holes you left in the back of my throat.
15. Loving you was as easy as leaving the lights on.
16. And that walk to your parents house was a floodlit symphony like you capitalised every word of every passage I wrote about you with
17 reasons to stay.
And 18 to leave.

The first was the last time I shook like a guard rail and you were a concrete staircase, and I swear, I ain't never seen nothing like you yet.
The second: my fist on your name. But I am here now, like a lit splint bursting into flames, you won't ever find a ghost like me again babe.
The third. And you just want to **** everything. I said you just want to **** everything in your Berlin Wall house.
Your girl's got a bullet hole for a mouth and when it rains, it really does pour round here.

How easy do you forget what you left there?
When you stream those chemical trails do you think about the girls you tried to write down but couldn't?
I wonder if you find the pieces I left you under bottom drawers and do you sign yourself away next to my names when the door's locked and I'm the only thing left sitting, watching the window for traces of you?
Did I mark you like you did me?
I left my favourite things for you on the off chance
that you will still taste me when you remember pouring sugar into my tea
on Tuesday nights, or white Sunday 4pms.
I haven't breathed as deep as the day I left you.
I want to tell you how I don't wait up for you anymore,
don't listen for Greek around every corner anymore.
There are parts of us stuck beneath the floorboards, the walls wait with baited breath,
and this skin is so volatile I have to walk through myself just to remind me I'm here.
I breathe you out.
Maybe you are still seeing, me seeing you,
in your head.