The car will edge past the truck maybe
and maybe we'll survive this message
playing on repeat, apologies like daft lilies
and then you go ahead and tell me that you've never
learnt from your mistakes, or my mistakes.
That mistakes are only bad unless you change the order
of analogy. This experiment has been contaminated.
Now a fresh batch. Trust me, there's a point to this.
I'm counting back from a hundred and two
and you've got me standing in the middle of the highway,
blindfolded; this is what loving you felt like,
you said. But I think it was more dramatic in my head.
Nuclear fission and the seige of Dresden dressed
up playing Adagio in D minor; I'm dust. I'm dust.
I've become ash and misery and I'm trying to stay inside you
but you've been coughing a lot, and who's to say
you were holding your breath for something exciting,
I just know for a fact that at the end of this beep,
you'll know what to do and yet
you're not going to leave another message.

My name spells love in every language
you say you’ve learnt; the pulsating
streets of your veins are alight with life tonight.

We walk them with empty-pockets and
hand-in-hand; the only crimes we commit
is that we lead each other to dark places;

a castle of lies; half-said the only loving
we’ve done is in our heads.
We lose time in words and suddenly

it’s four a.m. and the coldest hands
have only ever been yours; all that throbbing
gone to waste. Rest your heart

with me, it’s never lost; four a.m.
is your hour with me
because you’ll sleep and awake

and we’ll become thieves of conversations
stealing emotions we hide in jokes
and the sundry ‘have a nice day’s.

This is where the heart lies:
softly in the hands of rhyme
and meter; we've made a shrine
out of syntax and code.
We tell stories and we sing songs
about life and love, and this
is where some of us grow up,
this is where some of us die a little
each day.

This is our home, not your playground,
so keep your fights
out of here.

I.

No, don't go now. Please
don't go now; the fog is creating ghosts
out of people and we're breathing clouds out of our mouths.
Tell me about that time when you held your breath
under the lake for six years and still survived;
tell me how if I do that, it'll never work.
I'm not a sea God
any more.

II.

My knees tell better stories than my tongue
ever did, please don't; wretched hive harangues
the mind in a plague, can't you see I'm holding you down
and telling you you're all I ever wanted,
you're all I ever wanted; your head is the stuff of dreams
you're all I ever wanted; you can put your arm
right through me and only feel mist;
I am fog. I'm creating ghosts out of you.

III.

Make it up to me in a rainbow of hues of grey;
at the end of it I'm holding my ribs open. I've never
been more colourful and sad at the same time.
You're the mirrors to my house; stay
has always sounded better than don't go

yet neither seems to work anymore.

The man sings like a plague
crawling on the ground,
its attachments are not the first
thing you’ll notice, but when
his verses and the tone of his voice
slowly takes over the machinery

of your Monday morning misanthropy
you’ll begin to wonder
how you could ever forget
that loving takes more from you
than you could ever give, and how
you do it anyway. The toxin

now in your lungs, and your body’s
immune system is hostage to his
rhythms; chasms of his songwriting
has metastasised into your liver:
I love you’s taste like anxiety induced
speechlessness, and bile, and how

many times will you run this over
in your mind like a hallucination.
His song like a plague,
has wiped out this population
of sorrows, and what now of you
who has only ever claimed

that sadness was your art, your clothes,
your home, your sanity.

*What now?