I wrote you eight poems. They tasted like ground-up cinnamon.
The lights came, I told them I had nothing else to write.
When they laughed, my bones split with them.
There were brambles at the bottom of our garden, they held their heat like the arms they scratched.
They grew back every time like they were reminding us that nothing else could exist in the chemicals.
The chemicals said no.
My skin told me I didn't want to be there. My hands ached.
I held my breath for the length of the factory. I held my breath every first time you touched me.
When we turned the corner in the dark your indicator flashing against the wall made me feel like flying. I still feel that when I don't think about it.
There is a hole near the top corner of the front door. I leave the back window unlocked. Maybe you will find a way in. Maybe you are still trying.
I held my breath for you.

My brain is divided into two:
the left and the right
And
while part of me wants to
cling to you and beg
for you to come back,
what's left
wants to cut you out,
clean and precise
until all that's left of you
are the changing pieces of my skin
where our cells once rested.
All of me knows
that I would never have the courage to do either.

4.30am and she is trying to speak to god like she believes he exists.
Bleeds like she is trying to speak to the stars,
when all she wants is to get further lost in herself,
I wish this girl was mine but she's not.
I can see his hands now on the back of her neck, contrasting skin
illuminating
the angle at which she holds her head
like she's dancing,
she's not.
He's not even there.
I have never been jealous like this before
but I can see it in the way she looks at me
that he is not exactly what she wants
like I was.
Maybe I should give her a name:
tree trunks trembling towards the ground like they're trying to get back home;
flowers thriving on the dirt made from your mother's bones;
the song I still sing to myself every time I am terrified of the lights turned out;
my names are too long. I have too many words written about her.
I couldn't even tell you about a reflection in her eyes without writing a ******* poem about it.
I just want her to dance,
to dance with me like I am a ghost and she is the last person left on this earth,
like a storm wrapping itself entirely around a streetlight,
like cracked eggs leaking what could have been into the dust,
her telling me I came on too strong,
too soon
too fast.
I just didn't want to lie to her.
She absorbed all my blood sugar,
left me shaking and sour,
"just let me sleep all night",
I will pretend I'm simply exhausted,
let me try and act like this didn't happen,
let me attempt to act normal around you,
let's pretend you didn't ***** all those lies on me
after you kicked me to the ground.
At least I was honest.
I don't think about you like I used to,
but when the rain is tapping my window like it wants to come inside and make a friend,
it is only masking the glaring silences you forgot to take with you
when you left me that night.
At least I was honest.
But I never told her that she was my church,
my last crumpled cigarette stuffed into my backpack whispering:
"they'll never find you here,"
praying to you that we would be something more,
like midnight movies,
4am ballrooms,
ringing ears after a concert,
ringing
like I heard you,
ringing through telephone lines after you left me,
you only ever called after you forgot it was my birthday.
You only cared when it was convenient,
when we were away from prying eyes,
when he was nowhere to be found,
do not try and deny it,
I am not stupid you know.
I am not blessed with numbers,
I do not know anything about the meaning of life,
or the behaviour of protons,
but I can mix colours and take a good photo
and
sometimes I write,
I still don't know what a poet is though.
I can only see that she moves like these words write themselves,
and she speaks like music bleeding through a closed window,
I swear I am still cracked.
The day that I left she never even said goodbye,
though I still have tattoos left from the tips of her fingers on those heavy handed nights,
I swear,
they didn't even sting.

If I could find a way to capture
the exact essence of you,
believe me I would.
And if I could find a way to modify the base pair sequences
which code my DNA
so that I would be
the person you wanted,
believe me I would.
But I cannot portray you,
because I do not know exactly what you are
or who you are,
or why you are.
And I cannot be the person
you wish that I would be,
because you will not let me inside the bullet proof shell
of your head.
So I will let it be enough, watching you
strut around streets pretending that these things
are really all you want,
when you are, in reality, almost dreaming of beaches and cliffs
and people
who I have never met
and who I will never be,
and I suppose
I will just have to pretend to be okay with that.

I was shy, my crooked-teeth, glowing front didn't fool anybody.
I was the type of awkward that made people run.
You were a typewriter: an electric storm sewing letters together,
ornate, pretending your weaving was something
that could ever be taught.
You wrote about all my wrongs.
Asked me to meet your mother.
Told me my drinks were too sweet, you were surprised I had ever
been drunk I wrote something cliche,
like how no sugar could ever match up to your coffee stained tongue,
to me you were so sweet.
I never liked poetry that rhymed.
I wanted to be someone without talking to other people,
hoped everyone would read me like a trans-Atlantic love letter,
understand every back street tragedy,
I am still learning that nobody
could ever memorise me like a paragraph. I am a closed museum.
I am breathing.
Once, I was a bundle, placed on my mother's chest.
She told me when I was born I didn't even cry,
just looked at the world like I'd been here before,
already figured her out. Carefree breathing.
She said she'd never seen anything so small
but so alive.
Sometimes I wonder if I've grown down.
I cry too much.
When I was eight my mother told me it was because I have sensitive skin..
I think about why we don't remember birth,
there are more traumatic things that happen than becoming alive.
My mother carried me nine months,
I wish I knew her reaction when she realised she was having a baby alone,
when I was six weeks old she flew us 8981 miles from my birthplace of Perth
to her childhood, a suburban, three bedroom house.
She bought a return ticket. Eighteen years on she still carries that
yellowed british airways paper around with her in her purse.
They left her job open for years.
I stopped asking if she missed the heat.
I stopped asking about half of my heritage,
I say the most convincing thing when people ask now,
I don't think I mind.
I haven't cried for months.
I grew up where the city begun to fall in love with the countryside
there was nature pulling itself out of the concrete,
like ignoring love hurts could make it any more feasible.
There was a girl, she never used to knock on my unlocked fire door,
just walked straight in every time, like she was a wildfire,
made me feel triumphant inside,
I wonder even now if that is how plant shoots feel when they break through the earth
praying upwards to the sun,
like she isn't a pin-*****,
do you think the sun knows how relevant she is,
just like some of us can't grasp how irrelevant we all are?
Have you ever thought about how many things are in existence that we can't see?
The distances can only be measured in time,
time is just a concept. We are more than numbers.
But nothing was built for us.
I wonder
if when my mother held her recycled baby against her reusable chest
if she realised that
either of us could have ever come to this.

When I get here, don't ever ask me to leave.
I'm not saying I won't ever leave just that I can make up my own mind
and I've been a long time coming
and you can pack my bags for me if that's what you want,
I was never one for folding,
for folding,
for folding creases,
for creasing folds down the middle like I was waiting to be split in two,
I am waiting for you to split me in two,
split me in two,
split me in two,
cut me in half and all you will find are mirrors.
Your face staring back at you. Jagged edges so I could feel you from the inside out,
feel you,
feel you,
finally feel you.
I've been knocking at your door,
staring through your windows every time I had your door shut in my face,
knocking on your walls,
knocking,
knocking down your walls,
cracking your safe so that you know
when the sky seems like the most solid thing around you,
that you are always a porch light.
You are a struck match, a roaring flame and I am orange, fully open,
I can always be your accident.
You are the oldest thing in the universe made new for me,
a lens,
my left hand,
my right hand,
my arms, clutching hold of my wrists
so I can feel your heartbeat in my fingers,
your pulse a busker, singing only for me when the clocks have stopped and the lights turned out
and we've been waiting at this door for too long.
And I'm just stuck at my boarding gate,
halfway across the world and you're still dragging behind
like it's all too fast
and all I can tell myself is that I would always drown in you.
I will always choke on your words so I can taste them in my mouth,
taste you in my mouth, like a warzone,
taste everything you've ever said, ever been.
I will make up my own mind. I will keep you in mind.
Keep me in your mind like a cemetery.
I'm a long time coming.

I watch tv with the sound turned off just so I don't have to hear anything that reminds me of you anymore.
Chest down, I'm trapped against the ceiling and I'm flirting with the impossibility that limbs so heavy could take me this high.
Neither of us know what day it is, one of those afternoons before December that never really rises and I am keeping the lights on just so I can promise myself that you're not really here.
You see, I get the usual 'I can't breathe without you around', but I can't float, even with you standing over me.
I lead-lined my lungs with both our insecurities, tied my tongue so that I can only make my eyes speak. I can't cope with mourning the lost words that hang in the air everywhere other people have been and I choke on you every time I speak.
And my bones break like insecure scaffolding every time I stand,
they tell me I weighed myself down with all these useless metaphors,
that they never had all four feet on the ground.
You pushed me off balance. My joints could never hold out long enough to hold the both of us up. My bones are like the wood that didn't get enough water:
I break under your touch. I crack when you speak.
You're still telling me you're leaving.

She is Sunday service love letters written in the centrefold
of a hymn book.
A coffee stain smile hiding the words of my favourite pages
of poetry that sits every night next to my bed.
This is my doomsday notebook rolled into the edges of cut off jeans
and you were my judgement day,
standing on the edge of a cliff pretending that my life didn't depend on it
in that second,
depend on me.

She is my Maundy Thursday:
give away everything I own like I can live with nothing.
Live like I don't exist anymore.
Leave without a trace like burning,
because that's how I am when I don't remember you now.

Sitting in my bedroom with the lights turned out
you moving next to me like dancing with the covers off.
She promised me Saturday nights and feather dreaming
and now all I can do is this.
She told me the next evening:
'so many of these boys are clueless, I really hope I'm not'
I tell her 'I don't think you are
anymore'.
She says I'm down to earth.
I think she is too when her head isn't stuck above the clouds
there are things I would give to see what she sees
when she looks down.

I want to talk about gods with her.
I want to know if every medicated son of god complex really was
a psych case
or simply someone trying to finally send us down something good,
like we pretend we would see it when it happens.
Someone tell me how people
can paint the sky with their guts and the broken dreams of strangers
and call it religion.
How can these gods hate any kind of love?

Tell me why you wanted to die the year before you were a teenager.
How you're still trying five years on like you can't face
the seven months before you become an adult.
I don't know if you're terrified of real life
or being a child,
or if you still sweat in the middle of the night at thoughts
of an incarcerated man's hands touching your innocent body
like it was ever supposed to know what to do with itself.
Your body a haunted house, breaking from the cracks
you left in yourself.

You couldn't leave your own ghosts out.
Is this why 'god' lets you be so afraid of living in your own skin?
that you will dice yourself into pieces
praying for bad fate for once, tonight,
you're out of luck this time honey.

I'm sorry I don't know what to say to you nowadays,
I just don't want you to be all my fault.
I'm sorry I can't talk to you like I used to, like I didn't know
you were a time bomb
but I can't pretend you didn't light your own fuse,
because all you feel is leaking out the lines you left in your own skin.
I find it hard to believe you will ever actually detonate,
but I am more than over prepared for any hint of explosion:
buried my head in a glass case,
pretend that whiskey could ever take away the pain
like you were barrel aged.
So go ahead
knock yourself out.
I can pretend I didn't feel anything like you did all those years.

You sit, breathing in the last shreds of sunset like the sun reclining could make you any more alive I tell you
just stop trying.

You are a painting.
Da Vinci,
3 years on,
incomplete,
no idea of your own beauty.
Your glazed surface
isn't cracked yet.
You are a work of art waiting to be fully formed.
Paints hand-made, every brush stroke a sacrifice,
you're more than this oil
not an acrylic, he can't paint out your mistakes.
Tell me how does it feel to be the pigment in your lips does it feel like home?
Can you see me?
How does it feel to hang all those years
do you forget every face?
Can you hear what I'm trying to tell you
for once?

If you see her, can you tell her:
I only wish I could have captured her on film
before she left
me.

There is a 93 year-old man. He has been driving for years
trying to unlock his lover's jaw
it is stuck tight with the thoughts which have become lost somewhere
near the back of her head.

He thinks about the mist in her eyes, how once they were islands.
She was a child surrounded by the sea. He was a soldier.
Sat next to two bombs they both went off,
when he met her
he told everyone he was the luckiest man alive. They were stranded together.

Now he drives around the Hebrides. Thinks about the summer
when the ferries stopped, they ate nothing but salted fish.
He is desperate for her to remember. Somedays she does.
The winter he met her father her family
had never seen an Englishman before. It was so bleak.
She only used to wear shoes when the snow fell like an apology,
now her feet are so lost they barely carry her
from bedroom, to bathroom, to window.
She looks out over walled gardens, everything she once had was an open space.

She tells me about the day he came home from the army.
Threw his pistol in the bin
like he could ever throw the war away
I think of the irony: a man trying to throw the pieces of his life away
that he could never forget. Now all he can do is look
through flesh and heartbreak
and too many stories to tell.
All the addresses in his book, like they're not just bricks and bones
and nursery rhymes
like it's all falling down now
through curtains
and IED's breaking through bodies over screens.
Like a train crash.
Like a house fire changing everything you know
holding it to your chest like it's more than ash.
More than this.
Looking out on a bank holiday wondering what goes on
behind all those closed doors
counting all the things you miss.

I would give up sleep for you.
I would live my life five hours behind.
I would spend my inheritance money.
I would leave like breaking in the morning
just slip out through the door.
I would swim the ocean, loose my body to the current
like a broken bottle frayed and battered until I was all green frosting and smoothed edges
and opaque.
I would wash up on your shore.

I would drive for miles. I would purpose build.
I would tear up the books, rewrite them with your name
over and over, out though the skies,
climb up through the atmosphere
paint the moon with your face.
Loose myself to gravity. Just give me something to blame.
Give me water. Give me tidal waves. Give me ocean hearts,
your storm-wall, ocean heart, breaking-wave kisses
wear me down gently.
Tell me your life story. Write me into it.

Remind me when I forget who I am,
even, when you have nothing else to give.
Take me home.
Tell me something true.
Pin me on your chest like a buttonhole,
wear me to your wedding.
Show me off
like I was ever something to be admired.