I am leaving scratches on the ground; dragging
my feet: they no longer take me home
if there is one.

The tree in the backyard fell during the storm
and with it went the young years of my life
torn in half by the lightning

and took from me the shade I sought
in your hair and the thoughts they often led me in
and some belief in fantasies.

Even my dreams won't cross the threshold of the room
I confine you in; you haunt me
like homesickness and runaways.

You gave your life to the birdhouse
and waited for the wings to reveal themselves; flutter
and fly away.

The spaces between my fingers wanted
to fill with the bones of yours with such urgency
that I forgot how cold it always felt

and I could never guess if
it was your skin
or your heart.

There are fireflies in the garden during the dawn
and the moon, till the day, stays
hung over shuttered windows like some
homeless
hopeless looking for love.

You turned my world onto its head
and brought me down in chains; now
bubbling the last of me in some
Chinese torture chamber of love
in a dark room of your mother's house
full of the horrors of your childhood
and your children.

You scar this skin like I can go out
wearing every verse that escaped your tongue
like a trophy fallen to dust:
gone sheen, glory and all.

Rivers are finally flowing backward
and I swear I saw pigs fly
in a sky as pink as the lips of you on your glass of venom.

Galleries of art are slipping into the street
because masterpieces were absolutely
nothing when it came to the abstracts
of brilliance and dark you could create
by the harrows of your mind.

I was no story teller and
I could never put you to sleep.
So you slip away from my bed, mind, heart and hand.

And it tastes like a broken marriage
too hot on the tongue
and too far gone to believe
it could become unmended.

Rain sometimes falls in numbers
one here, twice there.
On me
**all at once, all the time.

Stupidity tastes surprisingly like guilt.

Don’t listen to a word that escaped my lips
when I stood with a foot out the door
and myself out of my mind;
I’ve no other way
to keep still
the fires that rage in my belly
sometimes spew out of me in a definite set of words:
leave if you must.

I have shaky hands and I spill a little heartbreak wherever I go.

Oh god
when it’s all over
we still have to clean up.

I was the one who swallowed the sun
and yet it is your touch that burns
on to my skin like an insignia of shame;
halos of quiet desperation,
a footprint on the welcome mat to our own
little hell.

So the next time you cry for your skin,
remember
I scar for you.

She says she can
make the sky change into
the colours of shame:

but how could she have known
that I already walk
with a cloud over my head?