At night when you love me I get lost in you,
entranced in the gentleness of your hands
and the glory of your skin upon mine.
You bury your hands in my curls and
sigh loudly - you are a primal thing,
and I'm the pagan to enshrine you.
You are my only true religion,
a god bathed in the glittering sheen of perspiration
like in the richest clothing, covering
the most astonishing beauty of all.
I am a slave in your temple and you are
the only thing I worship; the only thing I still believe in
as I sacrifice myself in the flames of your altar.

i see you across the bar and i know you're like me,
an actor in the play of genuine happiness,
and when you buy me a drink i don't refuse
because we understand each other, and,
at least for a few hours, i can be what you need.

tonight we will be swearing love to each other
in rhymed couplets and the touch of sweaty skin,
because that is how we lie, you and me,
and we have grown so accustomed to this way of
never telling the truth that we convinced ourselves
we were meant to be actors, that we feel the truth.

tonight i will swear to be yours, and you mine
while we both wish for someone else's hands on our skin
and their lips on our mouth, sighing iloveyou.
we are the same, you and me, buried 10 feet under
the hard concrete of a love that will never be
and all we can do some nights to lessen the pain
is find others like us, and pretend to love them.

Cold rain pelting on my skin,
city lights reflected in the wet black tar of
a road almost too narrow for the cars racing by -
all this I saw last when you were standing by my side,
feeling the nighttime city live and breathe around us
as we watched people scurry by and call for taxis in the cold.
It has never felt lonely to me before, I never saw
how isolated you are in a city when you're standing in its heart,
watching the blood pump through veins around you
and yet not moving, stagnancy amidst torrents.
A neon light flickers across the street from me
and I am ripped out of my dream to realise
you are not with me this time.
I see you in every street lamp;
around every corner I expect to see your face
to face only myself in the mirror of a dark shop window.
My face looks unexpectedly hollow,
my shape unfamiliar without you next to it,
and I wonder when my life became about you.
I do not belong here, into this city where
lights gleam bright even in the darkest hours
and sirens scream agony all night long.
I am from a different world, one where
dogs run free across wide fields and along rivers
and the air smells of fresh-cut grass in spring.
I am from a world where nobody locks their door
and stone-and-wood houses are made to live in,
not concrete boxes where numbers rule lives.  
All this was once foreign to me, and is again;
I do not belong with the neon lights and cinemas,
the glass facades and cold black tar,
I do not belong with the flashing ads and loud sirens,
the people who don't smile as they walk by.
All these things remind me of you.
I was one of them, one of the souls that made up this city
but I cannot live in it when you are not here.
I do not belong here anymore,
among the thousand lights that remind me of your eyes
and the constant noise that sounds like your breath.
All this reminds me too much of you.

how am i going to wake up and know
i won't be seeing you all day?
and how are you going to fall asleep
without my body pressed into yours?
who is going to get me
that raspberry ice cream that i love so much
and hug me when all i can do is cry;
and who is going to get you
nando's and a cupcake and a movie
and stay with you all night when you're sick?
who am i going to share my dessert with?
and who's going to eat the rest of my pizza
late at night in a dingy takeaway?
we are both falling apart piece by piece
because we are drifting apart inch by inch.
i cannot be without you.
i've forgotten who i am on my own.

someone is probably
in love with you right now -
even though
you think you're boring
and stupid
and weigh too much
and sometimes smell bad;
someone probably
saw you last week and
wiped their sweaty hands
on the insides of their pockets
and thought about
your body under your
favourite sweater
(that you think everyone hates)
and about
how you would look
asleep in their bed.

she says she ain't pretty in that southern voice of hers
and yet i still feel like her kindness alone makes her so very beautiful;
she doesn't see what i see when she looks at herself
and somehow she sees things in me that i never could -
maybe we are the same, me and her, i don't know
but what i am certain of is this: she doesn't see her own value.
money could buy a thinner waist but never pay for a heart like hers
and that is what's important, in the end, in a world like ours.
maybe if we all start to understand this,
the world won't automatically become a better place -
but i think it's a good place to start.