Growing up is becoming a haunted house on legs,
full of ghosts,
wisps of memory fading in murky bogland,  secrets spoken under cover of darkness and sheets -
It is learning to live in the creaking halls,
to unpack the boxes you can and occasionally, dust the remainder,
unraveling the dialects of the wailing in the knowledge that not every ghost you harbor can be understood,
you are the first and the last - each unearthly door to nowhere that trails through your rickety frame
a mirror constructed in your image -
All my love to the ghosts who have taught me everything I know,
Like just how heavy the light can be.

I never say sorry when I mean it
Just vomiting it out into the clean ceramic
After a binge
Of misunderstanding and bone shaking rage
My stomach drops sorry into the moments where I need the screaming to stop
Sorry is a pacifier
A ramp onto the high road
anything I can say to be left alone
Conflict running like tracks leaving bruises over my body
Familiar as the desire to hide and never be found
Yet I am always the one who spills sorry
A snake handler under the bed again
Yesterday I was not sorry
and my sorry could not stop the water from sluicing down the drain to leave me shaken and shaking
in the bath
But your sorry, hours later, after the trees felled have sent the electricity wires writhing within me
After you have manned the tank and rolled over me only to reverse and do the same again
After I have prostrated myself for your flagellation that continues through the night
your sorry means This is over.
Your sorry is a demand for a sweeping brush and a rug, for untempered forgiveness.
And I am not sorry
That my answer is no.

We were one man
Or woman
Or something -
Whatever it was?
We were one of those-
Small pockets of dust and skin and old receipts that linger behind the bookcase
All the pockmarks on the face of the teenage universe
Still learning how to drive
with shaky hands
A face breaking through the taut plastic shield of the lake surface
to gulp down air
An old house creaking in the wind
Singing its occupants to sleep
We were all of them
One man
Or woman
Or something else entirely
We were us and more

My mum tells me to be careful as I close the front door
Every footstep the tick of a bomb about to go off
And I know that she will worry until she hears me return
That maybe this time I wasn’t careful enough
But I know Careful
Careful is a woman who walks in our skin when the door shuts behind us
Faceless and watchful
With keys jammed between each finger
And her honey voice is flowing through a perpetual conversation with the home screen of her phone
Her gait wide and her hood up,
hair down but tucked away
She never looks up
only shifts her eyes from left to right on a pendulum trajectory determined to read the cadence of the shadows
Like they are palms or tea leaves or a CCTV in operation sign on the front of a shop window
On the walk home
She is always moving
A waterfall rushing down the steepest drop to get back home with all her foundations in tact
Careful is always waiting for the other shoe to fall
She is texting texting texting details of her plans
Where she has been
where she is going
what is the license of the taxi she is in
Are the doors locked as soon as she shuts them?
How salty is too salty for a margarita or a tequila or a glass of water
Can anyone vouch for the milliseconds that her drink was out of her sight?
She has a  pair of earphones attached to nothing jutting from her ears
and her key clawed hands wrapped tightly around a can of pepper spray
And her car is parked right outside the building
Careful is always a woman living in a war zone
where the enemies can be the ones that she has trusted most
Or strangers that cast long shadows
She is a landmine that is always in danger of being stepped on
She is made into a three star salad that the jury reject because she was underdressed
Overexposed like the photos that Careful should never have sent
Because even she knows that she cannot exist
A woman is always careful
But never careful enough.

What is the name for the feeling
Of being swept out to sea,
clinging to a jagged piece of your old self?
Migration always brings things back-
In time...
-full circle
A shadowy maw spits
Unfinished creatures squalling
to life from my chest
only to freeze and shatter in the morning sun
Burning is just like heartbreak - hurting until it doesn’t anymore -
But fish don’t cry;
They can’t,
Already choking salt water through camellia wounds gaping,
Swords rusting on a lake bed
Where they fell
Trampled through the forest of you-
Making room for rows and rows of boxes
All empty -
You needed the space to grow into something useful -
Pushing yourself out of the way,
A door cloven into a thousand dull fragments by an axe
Shining,
And swept out to sea to watch the
Walls, constructed, take shape-
Fish can’t cry even when they are burning in the lake
Blowing empty bubbles at an orange sword -
Pulled to the gaping mouth and deposited at the shore,
And chains of empty spaces take their home,
A conquest from within -
What is the name of this feeling?
Of being thrown overboard by your own hand,
Clinging to the last remaining piece of your old self,
Waiting for the gaps you left
to be filled?

It’s been three years
But your birthday is still programmed into my calendar
And even now I have to fight back the urge
To text you and say
Happy Birthday
and
I hope you’ve been doing good
and
How are your family?
It’s been a while, are you still you?
- I wonder why you’ve been avoiding me for so long -
If there is a crime I could have committed that I forgot but you never will,
And I don’t want to be friends again:
We are both too far adrift from the familiar shore that had bonded us in the first place,
But it goes against my nature to leave this stone unturned,
and I have seen you turn your nose up, turn tail on sight of me,
Like I am a disease you could catch just by saying hello,
As if you have never been part of my life before,
And I am baffled every time just the same as I was the first day you decided we were both finished with the other,
But somehow,
through it all I have kept a reminder of you in my calendar,
Three years later, worlds apart,
Even now I type out the message,
Imagine pressing send,
Knowing full well that you wouldn’t respond - if you read it in the first place,
So I don’t.
I delete every word and send them out into the universe;
Tonight, this one is for you.
Happy Birthday, G, and many happy returns.