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Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
When your teeth trace my skin,
and lovers' worries seem to disappear
beneath tides of lust and gin,
I am most myself.
Sweet daffodil memory
tied between eyes shut wide,
seep in, soft nectar.
The branches twist through me
and sway to the flow of your breath.
Children fawn over one another,
crashing and tilting all
through the darkness. You leave
a honeysuckle trace, bittersweet
and barely tangible.
You always have to leave,
but still remains the scent
woven through my body.
I close my eyes and drink in
the sweetness all around.
It lingers between my eyes.
Jan 2020
Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
All good things
They tend to fade
Leave you reeling
It’s no simple feeling

Like some silly coincidence
It flutters in the distance
I never saw you again

They prayed the night you left
I stood under the temple lights
Never felt a thing
Waited for you to come
Through the heavy doors

The trees won’t speak
Not like they used to
Your alto song whispers
In the forest that festers
With the age of you
The age of you
Dec 2019
Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
Far on my right, I can feel a sense of presence
lurking between your eyes.
You make me sort of crazy.
I feel like an insect in the moss,
ethereal worlds all around,
choking me, enveloping me,
whirling every other direction in the tangerine wind.
I fall into you every day.
7pm again and I don’t remember the date.
The bright of your eyes is whizzing away,
trees are peppered like windows with spray
by citrus scents blooming under a Scottish sky.
Your head always fits into mine,
we’re dancing and I hear the tune you’re singing inside,
an echo, a little breeze, subdued and quiet,
vaguely entering the room.
Echoes in the hallways, these walls hold no place.
Your arms around me are a city,
loud, relentless,
a ring of light pollution
hanging around restless sleep, tapping feet,
all of this just another haze
or darker phase come to take me away
from this place I have grown used to.
Paranoid and half-dreaming,
I'm not sure if you're somewhere behind me,
always writing love songs,
or if you're still only stringing me along.
I wait like paper under needle
weighing down the rest, nerves float into my chest
and I didn't hear what you said to me
in the breaks between the strings.
I am sometimes stuck,
motionless and out of sync,
suspended in the air we breathe.
I dream of living within you,
of how it would be to see the lonely tree
from your eyes,
the one with the leaves that emerge from nothing.
I think you also feel done in like a winter glare,
cold shadows going nowhere.
I think you know what it is to be a shard
of the blue, unwatched and unknown.
I only feel alone when I'm with you.
I know it's the same.
Dec 2019
Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
I didn't dream of you in particular
but there were flashes of you everywhere,
racing through my mind.
Snippets of poetry unspoken, unwritten,
I know they are lucid and true
somewhere. somewhere.
I wish I had asked you to stay,
for when I lay without you
I swarmed with unknown desires,
pulled you close inside and for the first time
since before valentine's, I slept the entire night.
And I wished so vividly for the ocean sound
of swelling breath to linger, gentle and fleeting,
in the warmth above my lips,
hearing again you whispering my name,
fingers tracing histories on my thigh,
sending shivers down my spine
Nov 2019
Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
I don't feel much when I'm with you,
But it's a lullaby that will do for now,
A lilting swaying song bowing at the knees,
Stuffy and overbearing.
I'm a line hanging on the horizon
Endless, muted,
You chew me up and spit me out,
Viscous paper foaming on the tarmac,
A receipt glued to the window,
Discarded next to bins
Overflowing
With a plastic ocean,
And I'm floating away,
Further and further from you,
On a whisper of cellophane
Lulling me to sleep at night.
Lurking in corners, I sit foot under foot,
Dreaming of wider eyes.
Less to offer is all I want for myself
And us becomes them, something else
That I don't think I want anymore
As long as I can have someone to hold me,
Someone that my heart breaks for
Twice daily like clockwork
Oct 2019
Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
I shovel the endless yellow ocean
and I am the rug, the floorboards,
opening and closing beneath quiet feet.  
Skipping stones and drifting tones, the world is quiet
and uneven, full of meadows and sadness.
Children jump through the bright haze
like lovers to conclusions, heavy with dulcet words
and poetry. I watch their edges blur
as they ricochet off one another
and I can barely remember.
neither here nor elsewhere; I am okay,
a feather on the waves. Something of a memory
shifts across the surface, glinting on my tongue,
and leaves again faster than before.
Woven with the wool resting on your eyes,
I am sure that your bonds are my bonds,
but skin is soft and isolation climbs underneath it.
I am a horizon endlessly unravelling
and you are an echo of a distance I can no longer recall
Nov 2019
Scarlet Niamh Aug 2020
Limbs on my limbs, back to my back,
fingers dancing everywhere.
The hair on my arms is tall.
I don't know what it means
that last night I dreamt of you standing
in the cold, October night, breathing smoke,
that safety lives in the weight of your head
on my shoulder. Whispering into my ear
all of the beautiful things your heart feels,
I am lonely and unseen. That heavy feeling
only seems to fade when it's your heart
beating next to my heart. I almost love you
in the dim lights, the taste of a name written
between your eyes, the way I loved her,
recklessly and without abandon.
I see your eyes shining so bright,
so close to mine,
and I wonder how the world would be
written in your broken verse.
Splinters and thorns, I split apart.
I leave over and over again,
I no longer remember the way.
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