My sister said she saw you
not long after we broke up
she said
“She’s…not been doing so well”
And the way her pause felt
coming from someone who
is never lost for words
Told me everything I didn't want to know
about the shortcuts and the destinations they lead to
I know I have no right
To the answers of questions never asked
I just wish you had told me.
Wish you had said something.
I can understand why you didnt though.
How this must have ground your teeth down on the pavement,
As your tongue walked every excuse home you could think of.

I wonder how you first found out
if it was with a distaste for the bitter black coffee you loved
Or in a yearning for porridge again
honey sweetened and spiced by cinnamon
Oats rich on your grieving, no appetite tongue

I wonder if
When all was said and done
You starved yourself like you said you never would
To have your body wax concave
Instead of convex as if to reflect
The parabolic curve of pain pinched waist,
Hourglass carelessness
Answers to the equation of us.

I wonder if your resolve hit as hard as the realisation did,
Or if you anaesthetized yourself to the question,
The way you said you would never drink your pain away again.
And I wonder if had known sooner
if there would have been any room in that excuse for me too.
 
When you found, did you pat your stomach absentmindedly
Or did you just brush it aside?
Did you name it burden, or curse, or something to take care of, or did you not name it anything.
But simply called it goodbye?

If it had been a girl, I would call it serendipity
Its got a nice cadence to it
and I think that something
equal parts ****** up us
could grow into a name like that.
If a boy, then Bump, or Oops or Accident after his father and his ignorance

Had I the choice I wouldnt wish it anyone else

So I know I shouldn’t name possibilities just to grieve them,
But I only just found out the cost of shoebox coffins
And the unworn boots that fill them.
Maybe I am attributing too much weight to a collection of cells not much bigger than a fist
But I know the weight of that in my stomach,
So I can’t imagine how the absence of it felt in yours.

I do believe in choice,
And I won't pretend I have any idea
The choices you must have gone through
Nor will I compare asking only promises of me
To requiring 40 weeks of you
 
I just never got asked what my decision would have been
And I wish it would have mattered too

If you need to – I still want to talk
I have a cup of tea waiting
Grown cold from being 3 months too late
Just like we were.

Do not date boys who write poetry
Their careless skill with words will
Have you captured as but a passage
And you are so much more than that

Date a man who knows nothing of metaphors
Love someone who knows science
See if he can learn your algorithms
From energetic beginning
To entropic end
Who can experiment with bringing
Luminescence to your fingertips
And suns aflame within your stomach
Date a man who is dyslexic with emotion
Who knows nothing of metre and verse
Doesn’t know how to write poems
But writes you one anyway because you are his universe

Do not love boys who fall asleep with Bukowski beside their beds
They will try to pretend that their eruptions
Are frustrated justification for treating you like they learned from him
Volcanoes, they are not, they just simmer and seethe
Keeping you Vesuvius ossified
In petrified acceptance that all men are *******.
Going through implied inactions
Inspired by a *******
You deserve better than disasters and they are dangerous
And only beautiful from afar

They will never learn to write you right anyway

Similarly do not love mean who love late night cafes
Black filtered coffees and white unfiltered cigarettes
Their bitter jealous love will leave you in absolutes
It will stain you like so much scratched and battered woodwork
And here you could be a forest
Though they may *******
So sincerely
They are treacherous rain,
Slick on pavements
And storms in teacups
Though they may make you wet
So you call him convection clouds
They are just bad weather
Date someone who is up before the dawn
Because they just don't know what the day holds
But instead hold their cup of tea so sweet and milky
You jokingly call it candy,
And raise a cheers to the new morning
And whose hard heavy worn hands hold hard to your form
Who never touched nicotine because they lost a relative that way
Who never touched verse because life is enough of an education
They will know more about the world than those poetry boys anyway
Don't date boys who tell you you are fire
They are only looking to get burnt
And will add fuel to embers to ensure you don't get put out
Every sweet word is just lies
Don't date boys who say your eyes are the seas
To hell with cliches (and your eyes are brown anyway)
If they want to drown let them find someone else
With the same taste for saltwater

Don't date men who say "they can't describe you"
As they will try and each and every frustrated sentence
Will rattle you
They will call you legends
And not understand when you don't live up to the poorly
Constructed reality of the myth they envisaged

Every published word smells of every other girl
And remember every letter of every word they put out there
Is one millions scraps of drafts as prayer
So take their million million
Million, million metaphors for how much they love you
And return it to them unmarked or
"Could have done better - don't see me" .

You are not here to teach them
And you are a lesson they will not learn

I am building homes on the shorelines in hourglasses
hoping that this time it will last.
It has been over 18 months
But I know it won't last.
I will relapse eventually
Spectacularly

And pitifully.
Because one year not drinking is like seven to an alcoholic
And I’m still ageing in years of the dog that bit me and will never let me go.

Wanna talk about magic tricks?
It's only sober I saw how much I was disappearing drinking,

So lets call this bullet caught a bullet dodged.
This spell casts me in a bad light
That i can't get my shadow out of
call me Houdini because I'm still looking for  escapes.
You will notice
There is nothing up my sleeves but attempts
so don’t tempt me,
because I haven’t been sleeping too good
and I ain’t awake any better.

For all this freedom,
sometimes I want to take the lockpicks I kept behind my teeth and close shut the world back up over my head again,
Spend a spell or two inside the prisons i built myself again,
Fall back into sunset habits again,
Rather than face the sunrise clear headed
Knowing that this
This is as good as i'm ever gonna feel.

I am sick of being cured because this is no antidote.
No one is afraid of the dark when the lights are on

There’s a morning chorus still singing the burden of nausea
And dropped  by the graceless hands of fate
Another Day breaks.
But for all the fragile homes I built myself in the name of safety
I have no time for walls right now.
I know I built a life of alcohol and I
But we strayed together for all the wrong reasons
And hedonism is not a coping mechanism
And I’ll always remember how this works
in yesterdays that escape me
and excuses that made me
With fearful nights where I was relapse ready
and days like today
Where my resolve is whiskey **** soft like a thrift store sweater
I tell myself tomorrow is just one more day to get to the end of.

Addiction is any port in a storm,
though i’m weighed down by the seas I swallow to keep me steady
You can’t call call me three sheets to the wind anymore
cos i’m tying hope to anchors
Onto these glass kept ships that I used to sink myself in.
There are no answers in a bottle no matter how often you ask it
And i'll keep asking.
Hold me like a funeral
Cos i am not strong.
Hold me like your breath,
Cos technically theres a lifetime supply of it
Now matter how deep you go.

I am 100 years of hurricanes

I have fought avalanches and won

I am a monument to a disaster that never happened

I have been shaken in exact sync with whatever earthquake
You tell me I should not be walking with
You ask me how I survived this well who the **** said I did?

Am i as much a symptom of the world as I am sick of it?
I never figured out the trick behind this
I never knew what proof I had of this
Just knew that it was always too much too often for too long.
Just knew that it was always too much too often for too long.
Just knew that one way or another this will be the death of me.

I know where this journey takes me, and what it takes from me
So when asked for directions I say:
“To hell with us there is no us!
No you and I to talk of.
You were only ever a wrong road
and I am headed due north of this rock bottom.”

I'll be the tornado if you can find my ruby red shoes to be twelve stepping in.
This close to failure I wear seven league boots
And I know the exact route of just a few moments longer.

I’ll let the seasons decide this one
(Let them change me like I  didnt)
Keep whiskey and knives away from me;
I got this achilles throat from trying to swallow the styx.

And I'm not scared of mortality’s uncertainty any more;
My Haros hand is sure.
Though I didnt have any doubts drunk
I'm sure
I was never Sam when i wasn't sober.

Do green fingers still pull triggers?
Or do they only till the fields of hair?
Ploughing furrows of worry through thinning follicles,
Tangled knots of concern, snarling their path from the true.
Or can they only point accusingly,
Trembling fists beneath pointed judgements?
Hoping the directions sought by those lost,
Do not lead them down the garden path of violence.
This is for a man who takes nurturing into his hands.
A man who believes that the Kingdom of God can be found on earth.
A man who is determined to labour here in this the city of his birth
To cultivate the hope that springs eternal.
Changes part of the faith in his dreams to piece together his reality;
A world without violence.
These hopes are sleep sent for certain.
But his hands are sandstone
So when he rubs the rest from his eyes
He's only shaping his wishes into something less fleeting
For sure, his resting place is a flower bed
cos he wakes plants from their sleeping.

For each shoot that doesn't fire and grow
And each root that doesn't take hold and show
Each colour he knows they're capable of,
feels like a personal blow to all the effort he's put in.

This is the last gardener of Aleppo
His name is Abu *** and he is sick of watching his city fall apart
Ash Shabbah – the city of white soil and pale marble
Now  the white of ash, pale of face and fearful.
Once sanctuary against war,
Now this may as well be the last garden in the world.

He tells us “flowers help the world and there is no greater beauty than flowers”
And so for years, as his city suffers pallid,sickly but not bloodless,
He makes bouquets by roadsides for those who chose to stay
or have nowhere else to go,
or have left but their bodies remain,
And whose only beauty is ribcage grown

He wreathes his arm around the world
Turns our world into a garden of funeral tributes,
appreciated only now
In stark contrast to the destruction that never ceases.

He tends to carry on conversations with the dead
Motionless beneath the surface.
Friends or strangers
Rubble roused and fleeing, now their journey ended
Escaped as best they could, holding flowers in hands
 as he tends his garden still.

It’s a losing battle, lost
How only weeds grow through the cracks that civilization left .
Lichens lasting forever whenever they find the surface to hold onto long enough in this turmoil.
Though he pines for lillies;
 White crocus and daisies grow best in rebel held streets.
No matter.
He makes the dinner he deserves
fragrant with rosebay willow herb
And sage for remembering
But he can’t help but develop a bad taste in his mouth .
He has no taste for retribution
And he has nothing to cleanse the palate,
Of the pungency of despair,
The starvation of the soul.

The desert creeps further into his domain every year
Tendrils of havoc pushed like weeds wicked fingers by fertile bullets
Planted with no thought for the cruel blooms that unknown casualties assume know best
Brush strokes of red lichen, grace pocked walls carelessly evident of lives now past.
For every gravestone reminder of fertile soil
He knows each harvest relies on the last.
Cultivating only goodness in his heart,
the last gardener opposes the law of abandoned places:
That only rot will grow in the spaces left by humanity’s neglect
With agriculture he fights the ravages of the faithless. Torn turning this place into nothingness,
Looking for any hope this last chance leaves in a forest fresh of despair
So he tells us he’s heard from God that
“This tree will live and we will live despite everything.”
And he believes that the timbre of his voice would drown out the violence as he kneels in prayer,
As everything he loves splinters around him.

And he believes that even against the decrepit disrepair
That He can make this place an Eden again,
An oasis of calm during conflict.

Ibrahim lost his father
But maybe his memory can blossom and some beauty can bloom from the killing fields
Of the lily white city that can raise it’s own colours as a flag
And surrender itself to the will of the God of the Gardeners.

They said they wanted to take the molars of
Those fleeing danger that they had escaped
By the skin of
Then leave the reward of sanctuary beneath their pillow whilst they slept
As if they weren't having trouble enough already
With where to rest their weary heads

They said the rewards were many
And wanted to make completely certain
They weren’t being too generous
Because giving gifts gives rise to greed
So they decided to take the teeth
And ensure those safety seekers
Knew exactly what being bitten means

And those who sought for something more?
Those bitten by these charitable actions as much by war
Their wounds didn't heal
And they found sores on weary feet
To find they had grown hungry mouths there too
The shoes that ate the distance beneath their step
Yielding bite marks as footprints and yet

They stored safety as a promise
In between records and held up blue plaques aloft
That said "I was not born here on this date
But I belong here" and I've history and a home to make
But for all the shiny pennies that they saved up in a jar
The princess dentists could still feel each
Generous donation, milky beneath their mattress

And each asylum seeker kept them up
And we clean teethed few, who always knew to brush
For three minutes before bed
Lucky by grace of birth, seas and a few miles more
Looked at these dentists questioning
but they shook their head
Warned us of the toothache of their seeming sweetness
So tell us about dental hygiene
how to floss lies from our gums
or else wait for all our teeth to fall out
Have them taken from beneath our pillows
Where  we had gracefully saved them like we were told to
Constructed into fortresses
Utilized the tooth extraction cotton buds
as comforting ear plugs and pulled  the wool over our eyes

Let’s wait until our retirement
Till we realise the Toothfairy wants our bones
Not just our molars
and we pushed away those who only needed
The chance of rest and the chance of somewhere
new and safe to show us how to smile
So brush your teeth tonight
And be thankful
you will never know that those who turn away from you
Will do so, because your breath
Still stinks of all the **** you so readily eat.