i find myself using this red string as an excuse, a muse, something to abuse. i used to pull it tight around my wrists and lose it in rosy verticals. it hurt until the pull choked and made it numb, numb until it wasn’t there and if it isn’t there than it isn’t a problem. it’s once in a while, it’s periodical. i snapped back lying on my floor without a pulse, stood up and threw away the rusty blades. sabbatical.

i found myself using this red string as an excuse, a muse, something to abuse. when you choose to bruise cause you have nothing left to lose. the soldier who made it out with everything intact except for what’s in his head, but that blood runs clear so they ignore it instead.

i almost used this red string as a noose. but now i’m playing double-dutch, catching fishing lines and throwing beams of orange and blues. sing me a song, porcelain. you taught me how to swim.

just the way you looked at me that one time by the swing set,
do you remember?
i always go back to that moment
because that’s when we both landed on a page i swore we’d be on forever.
“what?”
“nothing.”
it’s funny how some things change
and others don’t.
after a while i’d be the one looking at you
but you wouldn’t tell. you won’t.
oh tell me, please, i want to know,
let me soak up your pain, let me feel it too.
i can heal you, i can fix you,
you have to know i’d never judge you.
“nothing.”
you looked at me that first time
and i swear you could see my soul
shining like a ball of light in your hands
like this was destined to make you whole.
that’s the first time you ever saw anyone
and the last time it would be
the way it was when i was yours
and you belonged to me.
“what?”
i wouldn’t have drowned you, love
i wouldn’t have extinguished a thing
but instead of what i gave, all i got was
“nothing.”

The comfort of cliche, the trampled path
of mixed tapes and photo booths
some semblance of a direction as we walk
in our own uncharted territory called love.
the grass is wild and uncut, and with woods we
can call Narnia. The wild orange flowers, strawberries,
and gooseberries don't smell as fragrant as your hair
or taste as sweet as your ears.
you whisper "oh my god" but you don't believe.
how can you not see the angel when you see your reflection in my eyes?

Written on the imprint of a prayer
Memories, tears
How did I get here,
To where I feel like I'm
Constantly begging to feel human again

Watch the sky darken
From the sixth floor
Thousands of lives intermingle below
I can't see the sun
But the clouds are always there

And what would the do if they knew
How I lost everything I was,
How I fell in love
How I keep feeling
But never think?

Crying onto the shoulder
Of the enemy
Stripped of my defenses
Naked
Accompanied, but essentially alone.

come quickly
come quickly
you silly old dog
when they thought of the name,
they'd probably had thought of a creature like you-well then right on the dot
for a pig with a stick in his eye and a stye for a leg could have begged his way faster to freedom
and found more to eat in a day then you eat in a week-but you stay?
And i wonder and ponder by ponds full of water collecting my thoughts in a vase now discolored
what marvelous mischief might happen if beast were no sanction and all things with thoughts were judged solely on actions
morality then would weigh heavy with sanction and perhaps no man dines at the right of the lord
only a creature, deemed fit to absorb his observance
for now, it is begging to get very hot in this furnace

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.

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.

my anxiety makes me feel like someone has cramped me into a little box
and my lungs have shrunk
and i cannot help but tremble
and i wonder if the millions of other people
who are so afraid of existing
would crawl out
and sit with me
so we could try to make each other
braver
cut a lip
with a fist,
maybe

these melt-away anti-anxiety tablets
don't work well enough for me
the coiled spring in my chest
is threatening

Who's that staring through my window walls, with eyes as old as time
the clock has not yet moved and the wind outside has died
no breath for me to find nor the strength to check the time
unless the minute hand is lying theirs a chance i may have died
I wish this all a dream but the eyes i see dont lie, they have told me with their watching that all men do really cry
yet in vain is all my wishing but perhaps this is delusion of a sedimentary man with his mind ripe for losing
Come at me then red devil, I shout within my mind yet the tension I had hoped for was delayed and rather dry
no ravishingly velvet flame encircled this such room, nor were the furniture and ottoman  thrown like an old shoe
marvelous the time in which a demon throwns your home and his only one intent is to stare right through your soul
to that i bid goodnight to you, to do as you wish, regardless of the manner I am nothing more then fish. to be shot out of a barrel for a fellow such as this
If you do deem it fit that I wake another morning all i ask is that the clocks all please return to working order