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R K Hodge Nov 2015
I adore you.
That is all there is to it.
Sometimes red poppies blossom in my stomach because of it
Like ***** watercolour water it grows increasingly murky
I find it is a beautiful shade of hurt and soul
It contrasts nicely with my porcelain casing
Like a tea *** I am poised to empty my contents
I adore, you.
R K Hodge Jan 2016
Drag your teeth from my heart
I uttered.
Stemming the flow of gold you were
Please stop forcing such a clot
I will give you all the empty spaces
They are for you
Simply leave alone the flesh of the heart, it cannot be a dog's toy again.
R K Hodge Jan 2016
Who was that arrangement of bones and ligaments you once held
What was that clump of hair you used to touch in your precious mapped hands
Those elegant or false words that were told, were they deserved
The chipped nail varnish upon each digit is more sincere, each truthful shattered fragment portrays brittle yearning like the fluttery fragments of pollen grasped within a drying flower
In each trigonometric microscopic distance there is light, darkness and colour
There is so much more than the laughter and saliva spilt upon the foggy expanse of past that once was.
#words #elegant #hands #flower
R K Hodge Nov 2013
I do not have it in me to be the kind of empty and full that you need
I carry secrets and liquid sad feelings in my stomach like an antique hot water bottle
They are the colours of mashed up autumn leaves and ***** puddle water and decaying petals floating on some pretend witches potion
Crimson rust lines the edges of my eyes, I use black eyeliner to patch the pinprick holes, where I have previously sewn, trying to forget
These are the remnants of my rock heart which has been eroded away
The powder sits regretfully in my veins
When my heart beats I feel it scrape and catch the pink surfaces
It aches too much
My insides are losing their pinkness
Your presence is abrasive
Use a higher grade sandpaper and be done
Take off the old circus ride paint layers, my nail beds are already saturated with chips of red yellow and blue
Reach something clear and peaceful
Cut lengths of my hair, and separate them into small twists, tethered with small satin ribbons to be used for some happier embroidery
Or to be stored in tin lockets
Or to be disposed of in rivers like those Georgian keepsakes that mothers leave at hospitals
Let other people write with it
Pass the used up glass needle like straws through calico or linen
Felt tip the colour over
Cut out my heart and let the elements sit.
R K Hodge Jul 2014
You will always be able to have what you want
Unlimited canvases of soft inner thighs and painted lips, curled hair
I saw into you and found that you will always be content
I saw this in the way you slept
Have you ever looked at someone and thought they were too attractive to ever deserve to be sad
Your cheekbones and chest, your arms and back are better than anything specifically crafted
Your words are sugar
Unbleached but naturally craving
Your voice is one of my favourite things
I don't know if I believe you when you call me beautiful
I should be too embarrassed to write you notes
I prefer your blue eyes to the sea and sky.
I would always choose to look at them over the static nature
R K Hodge Apr 2014
Place silhouette pieces or outlines of my heart in thirty or more envelopes.
Paste each one with a new soft paintbrush which clean cream bristles. Push them into torn up fragments of clean new watercolour paper. The sharp edges feel through onto the wooden table leaving mistaken, accidental grooves. Glimmers of sawdust are ****** up into the pockets of your lungs, where they contaminated and will permanently sit.
It was a small heart, the colour of grey sky reflected on seas and carried in bloated raindrops. The texture of diamond. Carved up as easily as wax by a blunt butter knife.
The envelopes are neatly labelled with white tailors chalk powders.
R K Hodge Mar 2014
I wish I felt like clarity and nothingness, or that intangible vapour like stuff which comes off of a power washer at a car wash
in a dark car park
the car's owner absent, away shopping

You were the one who put your fingers in my mouth
I'm supposed to be embarrassed and disappointed
I am both

I suspect you are a good person
you have a sister
who you love
I bet you are different when you go home
I bet you are nice
I hope they know what you do
You are a classical easy ****

But I'm just syllables and escort clothing
For a while I quite liked that
In fact I'm proud
My friends find it funny

You liked the smell of my hair
And gradually I'm piecing these notes together
I think that if I had more crushed up note pages grinding into your back
You would have remembered me

I'm pretending that if you taste that scent again, you'll know
I still have some of you attached to the garments at the bottom of a full laundry basket
R K Hodge Dec 2013
The inside of your throat is fully lined with silver
Where the plates meet there are seams of ancient gold, that was once old slivers of coins and has since been melted and painted on top of your organs and has become the tubes of your bloodstream, the molecules that faintly glimmer in your dark platelets
Like tiles on old church houses, nearly purple flakes of slate separate and cascade into the piles of dry  leaves
I hear pieces snap when I stand on them and it reminds me of how your voice cracks
It reminds me of stiffened folded pieces of dusty linens or fabric found in small wooden boxes with black over-painted hinges
You remind me of charms on charm bracelets, ones that are labelled with prices attached to pins which pierce through cheap looking velvet and thin padding
You are inexpensive and caged up
But we can see you, and like a modern tiger we hear your electronic yawns
R K Hodge Jun 2014
The glass you melted and then froze in my bloodstream finally emptied out.
It peeled away fragments of fleshy tubing as it did so,
like children's stickers
The same way glue melts on top of white wood gloss paint over a summer
'Well Done's become slurred
the excess stomach acid separated it apart like chromatography

I shut my eyes and you are the colour of petrol rainbows
a scent so distinct yet chameleon
I can still smell the feelings invisible but stiffened into my lace underwear
never have I let something sit so long at the bottom of my laundry basket
it pretends to be a cradle
light shears through it like church stained glass windows
a cheap alternative to the lead filled stuff you are used to
dress making scissors sit at the bottom of a box
I ought to have courage to crunch through the wire caging.

Instead.
All I am able to clasp is balloon helium.
#love #pain #sad #blood #glass #heartbreak #confusion #thoughts #lonely #relationship #fear #*** #self #passion #summer #longing
R K Hodge Aug 2017
Violet fire crinkling the golden skinned surface
Lip gloss slumbered upon your open mouth
Pinked and pinned
Pinned and pink
Lace softened into the edges
Bridging skinny emotions
Plasticised eyelashes shape organic eyes
Breathless ripples evacuate
R K Hodge Apr 2014
To me you are smeared bright pink lipstick
An accidental exposure of flesh
The taste of peppermint chewing gum
Cigarettes in black sky.

You are alcohol induced numbness. Not needing a coat.
That long street.
Those insults.

You are a collection of wishes and stupid things.
You might be clever.
You are arguments.

It was hard only being allowed to breathe through my nose.

I don't know what you write with
I imagine it's a black biro
Or you continuously press the undo button on your laptop

Those strangers in your kitchen were nicer than you
They let me out
I wasn't going to kiss you goodbye
I wish I hadn't.

Now there are certain shades of off limits colour.
R K Hodge Aug 2013
Sometimes I imagine that you could use a flat blade knife and separate parts of my body.
Like an anatomical model, an arm in half, a wrist entirely off.
An outmoded coloured wax model. Perhaps, a very old one. A decorated one with human or horse hair, closed eyelids and uncomfortable lips, and like those ancient roman ones, thinning sheens of paint on top.
The blade would slip through neatly, perhaps catching friction as it passes the block of soap texture, and leaves grimy residue on the knife.
You can see the vessels.
They are not clean.
Like my soul there are very nearly translucent scrapes and patches of liquid. Some days the liquid spills out.
Some days I just want to clean out. I want to purge, but I know I will just melt and the mistakes will be just as visible. You will see the marks that look like mouse's claws or pincers where I have pulled apart the skin trying to work out what went wrong. Doing some kind of surgery. Inside tying double sided sticky tape and chips of plastic, driving them in deep and forgetting about them.

When you say those things I can't be big anymore. If I'm tired you make me cry. Salt crisps up my intestines.
You make me imagine what it would be like to plunge a knife into my stomach.
I bet it would be satisfying like the braking of chocolate. Cracking of value bars.
But I have to remember that you are the organs thrown out at the end of the day, sloshing around in the bucket and I deserve to be preserved and anything that had been cried over or crafted is better than a remote controlled car. Stop telling me that it's not.
It's not as if I'm trying to be a petal or a fragment of netting fallen off a ballerina's skirt.
I've chosen to hover above the blades. I am nothing so frivolous. Feeling at home in a web of metal coated in paisley oven gloves. I am safe here. In fact I'm glad that thick haze separates us. You will never be able to find somewhere so tranquil. It makes me happy that there is no possibility that we can meet in the middle. It just makes it easier to keep the space, without the concern of some congealing platelets tethering to a surface which was never there.
R K Hodge Aug 2013
I think the sky looks best when it reminds
you of Hogarth or other of those 18th century paintings
with dark, tight clusters of small leaves
which scalpol and sillouette
against the powdery blue and creamy spaces
I imagine that I look down at my feet
and see satin shoes,
shimmery and slightly scraped apart at the seams.
The kind of shoes that would
look at home places by deep eggshell blue skirting boards
and bare floors
and light faded crimson rugs. Spindly legged furniture
accompanied by sounds of stiffened hand-sewn
dress skirts grazing the floor like a wedding march
Instead, I feel the cold and dry breeze
pass by my skin and into my lungs
and stomach and every other *****
or miniature tree branch vessel.

I think about what the Landscape would have
looked like three or four hundred years ago,
because it couldn't have looked like this
Now, I realise that like those paintings, this
sky, breeze, leaves and trees are merely an
impression
Not familiar enough or filled with enough bleached light

I would like to think that in another three
or four hundred years others will be breathing
a similar cocktail of air and pollution reminiscent of mine
and provoke some similar feeling

They might visit clothes like the ones I wore
In Museum basements they will be categorised in brown paper boxes
encapsulated in white tissue paper
labels hanging from under the lips of box lids
pencil marks indicating contents.
R K Hodge Jan 2014
Meter lengths of pink satin ribbons in twenty different shades from fuchsia to dusty contort my organs temporarily back into place.
Tear my chest apart as I lie down with the open single blade of a pair of scissors, score me like a parcel.
Frayed inch lengths and 20 cm lengths and edges of ribbon scattered on the floor.
You slipped your hands down the back of my underwear, like it could be perfect for an evening.
Take the pieces apart neatly, unfold me like a lady geisha. My Chest is willingly emptied for you.
Do what you want with the casings that make up my lungs. I'll cut them into confetti pieces so you can spend them on someone else.
I want to feel the heat melt off the pool chemicals in your breath. Then let you use my bare wrists like towels.
R K Hodge Dec 2013
I focus on where the bones in my knees
contact with one another
They look like marrow filled plaster casts of birds bones
Like the masts of bottled pirate ships, in my mind they swing and glue pulls up the surfaces of the wood as you tear the bones out like how you gut fishes
There are sharp edges like the serrated edges of a shark tooth
Small dips where I can now curl and negative spaces are left silently empty are neatly darkened
Puddles of liquid velvet evaporate from underneath and leave the wooden surfaces speckled with sticky stringy lines of tiny alphabets, so tiny you can't tell if they come from our culture or our religion
I'd like to tread in bleached white cotton socks and feel the white fill up with red
These alphabets hooking onto the softened brittle fibres
I'd wait hours until the excess ink fell away and revealed the spaces
I'd let you place your hands between the ribboned surface, you could pull them apart, they would slide perfectly like a new key in a new padlock would twist,and I'd let you examine the utterances carefully
I'd let you place your hands on my bare ribcage so you could feel with your rough fingertips the plaster cast version, the pulse of my wooden heartbeat, you could see how the alphabet confetti has saturated it
I fold my arms and cup the spilling liquid red
I would store it in glass test tubes to be frozen
Then examine them under light as if the red were capable of chromatography
I imagine the freezing only magnifies the frost grated into my heartbeat cocktail
R K Hodge Apr 2016
A glowing ember I once was
Now all I feel as if I all I do is sit upon the colour blue, wetted by dissipating champagne fizz whilst being kept afloat by curved cold glass
The bottom of the bath is scaled with confusion and differently shaped stresses
An unquenchable vanity lies within
The clumps of gold leaf I dust my cereal with has blocked up my veins
When I think about kissing you my brain floods with the taste of the reddest, sweetest cherries, only within this act the most vivid aspect of my mind is lit up as if it were a neon light display
Only within the flow of this electric current I am gloriously and contently happy
R K Hodge Feb 2016
Salute me I say
Solution me I say
R K Hodge Jul 2014
White cotton kisses
I pretend you occupy the space of this  pillow
I remember your navy sheets
I think they kindly absorbed the blood
it was there, somewhere.
beating or gliding within walls of muscle.
This type of loving has become liquid and electrical.
It is certainly electrical.
spiky pains edging fingertips
Strands of copper threaded into the grooves of your fingerprints
It has a real colour. I don't know what that is.
It's weight fits inside your body.
It is manufactured.
Maybe the ***** triggered it.
Or the serotonin shots when I see your face.
All I have with me now is bone dry fabric and wadding
R K Hodge Nov 2015
Why are we pretending that people carry solutions.
Another blood filled person is not a solution but a cavalcade, a fisherman's net of un-solutions.
R K Hodge Nov 2013
Careful, small mechanical pencil, or found pencil drawings,
invisible molecules of led dust settle upon and mingle into silky warmly lit pages
Secretly sandstorms are weaving and pushing marks between the leaves
They bloom into inky coloured metallic wire branches,
and delicately poke through modern punctuation,
tying knots and threading cotton timelines
Coiling and stretching out to catch through spilt glitter hazes,
attaching and embellishing hand crafted lace surfaces preserved in a brittle sheen of sealing wax
Collections of paper leaflets and dried ink observe patiently as you hold up precious encased and bound sentences
which breathe
lightly and calmly, at the same time as your heart echoes it's noises, so that you only feel the pulses
You are standing by your window, at the panes of square glass, keeping out the cold
Probably wearing gloves indoors almost ready to get lost outside
When you return and the cold melts away quickly I imagine those echoes of characters keep you company.
R K Hodge Nov 2015
People should stop thinking that they are so special.
People should ease out of the solipsism.
I have wine beside my bed. It is all saddening.
R K Hodge Nov 2019
Come back to the stars my love
My chest is iced over
I can see your faded edges
You are seated and still
Sometimes the lines darken
A body part pierces the screen
An entire hand coming into view
Then it is snatched away
Retracting through space
More silent than ever before
Even the cells in your body are quieter
A supple fingertip presses into the greyed
It is like testing the firmness of steak
The gristle wrapped around my bones is injured
It is not yet repaired
R K Hodge Nov 2015
My stomach is filled with molten things, but I will be able to feel more love than you ever will. Inside my stomach and throat pipes the hate remains incompletely digested. Our bodies cannot digest our own blood.
There happens to be silt film foaming on top like the fate of a desecrated porcelain sink, a vessel that ceases to be drained. This vessel will always be able to feel more pain than you ever will. The depth of feeling is all that there can be.
R K Hodge Feb 2015
There was a time when you and I had not seen ourselves in mirrors
Before we knew what we looked like
Before we knew how we feel at all
A time before I knew how my body would work
Most months rusty water drains
A packet of small white circular tablets coated in sugar is responsible for my happiness
I imagine my ****** is the colour of a faded flannel cloth
Red used to be my favourite colour
On many occasions My body has felt like a new years resolution.

Your sweat reminded me of rainbows in petrol
It tasted like the sea.
R K Hodge Feb 2016
Your voice was compelling
those words were beautiful
you are kind
kind as a damp kittens paw print pressing into your chest, uncomfortable and welcomed.
R K Hodge Nov 2015
For a while there was an elastic band gripping her wrist.
Then it snapped.
The taught frantic energy became dusty residue, a shed snakes skin. Fragments of it lay in the crevices of her cupped palm. Parts of it seemed to wriggle, until they didn't ache any more.
Looking up, the room remained quiet. A bad song landed through the speakers. Time started back up again. The pieces had to be scraped into the apron.
R K Hodge Nov 2015
She has already cried by 10am that morning, a little before work. Breathing, smiling heavily and pausing through a phone call.
Shortly, it would be adequate, fine. His voice would no longer be honeycomb to her, but it would be fine.
In that day when they walked everywhere there was an echo, an antediluvian thrill, all that feeling perished at once. It must have been written into her fingertips, expected in the arched shapes. Releasing back into the trail of sped up time positioning the pad of paper, lipstick tube and gungy pen upright and proper in the pocket.
R K Hodge Nov 2015
Plum-coloured patterns swirled under the skin of her left leg, knee and foot. For two or three moments while paying attention to the casing in which she existed, there was a kind of glimpse toward healing, and a separate simultaneous clawing toward animalistic combinations of hateful utterances.
A shiver felt its way out of her collarbone. Eyes a little more open than usual.
The eyes reflected the lining of grime that swells above a murky pond.
R K Hodge Nov 2015
What was needed now had to be more important. These things tucked away behind the creases of the forehead. Wandering through the beer garden as it became night collecting glassware streaked with saliva and alcohol, soaking under the nail bed it was sticky. At times knuckle bones contort out of place, dragged by the weight of the things. Yet, slow considered steps proceed. Bedtime has come around, the house cat places his body upon your stomach cavity. There is a knowingness in the expelled oxygen which grazes the face. Something poised. This something never arrives.
At night dreams of mistaken food and drink orders trickle into the chiaroscuro room. They **** and disturb, not allowed to unhinge. Unable to delve deep enough, never touching the soft ground or the dream space. Always aware that the alarm clock would bookend this type of semi-rest.
The morning unravels itself. As if mornings were a ball of powder-blue threads teasing the screens of eyelids. Daring them to follow the traces, the bread crumb led spectacle.
Placing eyeliner upon the lashline at the wall mirror, there in the flecks of light stirred a flicker. Appearing less frosted for specks of breath. Spoke outloud, the first utterance of the day. What exactly has happened. Amongst the bones that set out the arena of her body, it seemed that there was no one there to be asked.
girl love glass hurt eyeliner mirror eyes dreams sleep
R K Hodge Jun 2014
Read to me about things i'll never see
Imagine I'm sitting up in a hospital bed
Cradled by white cotton pillows infused with bleach
Empty clear bendy plastic cups sit neglected
My usual lipstick stains stayed in the handbag today
Your fingertip bruises decorate me instead
I once thought:
There is no better colour than the colour that they put into your eyes
That is the colour of the liquid that they have put in the drip bag
I might not be able to picture that colour, but I recognise the feeling of it entering my body
Rusty clots and mascara dust barricade it from leaving

Maybe not immediately
Or in a weeks time
But the cells of my heart muscles are becoming saturated with the juices
Becoming preserved in syrup
Seized and breathless

I knew that from the very first time I have been a can of something
Its label torn off
Unsealed and bleeding
And we both knew Duct tape couldn't keep that together
Still my hands were cupped trying to clasp
But now Its embedded under my fingernails.
R K Hodge Feb 2016
Being under that pier is gorgeous
It is excellent
I haven't been there enough recently
The sweeping water stays and remains on the shiny surface for seconds and hours and days
I want to come back to it
I need it
My stomach yearns for the embracing prettiness
It yearns for the sea gull marked sand
R K Hodge Sep 2016
Violent and truculent you found it chaotic and frantic
There were shed emotions
Emotions that are now stitched into the earth
They melted into it under the hottest setting sun
Sticky and wet are your clammy hands
The clothing attaches to your back with water
The pressure is now released from your eyelids
Your delicate eyelashes levitate without effort
There is a sincere beauty amongst your collection of tissues and bones
Bring me to the sea I yearned
So I could connect your beauty with the beauty of the whole world
I want to see you lie in the shallow water on top of the bed of sand
I want to see the pieces of sand smeared across your fingertips underneath the deep blue light
The deep blue light is the colour of sheer delight
It is the colour that I perceive to be happiness. It is the colour of unmatched infinity.
My smile is the taste of yellow lemon rind.
R K Hodge Jan 2016
People are carefully ripping the vouchers out of newspapers
Folding them in half
The people neatly place the vouchers in to their coat pockets or purses, in their jean pockets or bags
R K Hodge Oct 2013
If it would make you love me I would lie back
And bottle the secret, concealing it underneath my rib cage like a bottled ship, the twigs and scraps of fabric decomposing like the bones of leaves, dry and crumbling into different dusts
Actually, I wouldn’t even ask you to love me, and I would still position myself in some sparse pretty purgatory for you
Sitting in silence, on cold to touch hospital like bed sheets
There is colour slicked inside my chest, thick in parts as if it were chocolate applied with a brush inside a mould but for you I would keep the light out in some dull opaque haze
Flecks of my soul are rainbow enamels but if I could I would reduce them to dull metal powders for you
I would give up all others because they have no clean sails unlike you
I would allow you all those one syllable words

— The End —