What were once dreams
Unveiled to be nightmares
I can still hear their screams
I can still feel you there

Beyond the reverie
I asphyxiated
In the deep cold sea
That I created

Only fools would lock birds in a cage.
There they grow, and with them grows their rage.

In their eyes you can see the desire
to break free, to tear down the barbed wire,
and to launch at their captor, with claws—
sinking deep in his flesh all because—

—only fools would lock birds in a cage,
where they grow, and with them grows their rage.

Gothic Black
What will tomorrow be like?
We have to get thru today first
Then we can see what it’ll be like
The same old crap or different?
A perfect utopia of happiness
Or a black ash filled world
We will see as the days die
Night becoming the new normal
Some think tomorrow is now
And only darkness will reign
Like some scifi horror story
With us as the characters
All soon to perish in the night
I look forward to that world
More gothic than black

Imagine you are in a house with so many doors that you can’t breathe
for hinges and creaks and splintered wood. Imagine you peel
back the threshold to find a bedroom, the bed is hotel-made and the stink
of industrial cleaner fills you with blisters. Imagine you are trapped
in an expanse of rooms and no matter how many times you rip
the mustard bed covers away from the mottled sheet, you can never find
a room any different to the rest. Imagine that this is eternity
and in this eternity, you are yourself alone. Imagine that it gets easier
because it doesn’t, and you’re trapped in the limits of your mind.
So do it, conjure up a door that leads to anywhere else,
and when you can’t, imagine that you’re in a corridor. More rooms, more
and more doorways for you to stumble thought-drunk into, squeezing
the hinges until the oil comes out like lemon juice and the beds are made.
There’s light coming from somewhere that you’ll never be able to reach
and the corridor ends only with another beginning, you’re right
back in the thick of it again. The aye aye is pointing from the rafters
and you are plunged into dark yellows.
Imagine you’re sick with it, you’re green and turning like Autumn
into furniture. Pick a room and stick with it, you’re going to be here for a long

time.

Five.
There’s a lump on my breast that I haven’t told the doctor about.
I told my mum, and she said it was probably fine, so it’s probably
fine, even if my friends tell me to stop chancing it and see a specialist.
Sometimes I try to pop it like a blister or a spot, but it just stings
and then Google tells me that cancer is more of a dull ache, so it’s fine.

Four.
I threw up violently in the bathroom and then my heart felt heavy.
Ignoring the obvious irony of ‘heavy’, I could describe it as:
tight, aching, dull, wheezing, like a fist clenched right around it.
Convincing myself that I was having an elongated, stretched-out
heart attack, I took myself to the hospital.
They gave me acid reflux pills.

Three.
When I was seventeen, I was as seventeen as a seventeen year old can get.
That is to say, my problems were both numerous and the end of the world.
So it surprised exactly nobody, least of all the police officers that were called,
when I took a scalpel and tried to perform surgery on myself. Yeah —
that happened. But at least I got to ride in a police car
on the way to tell the crisis team that everything was really okay, I promise.

Two.
Osteoporosis runs in my family. Like the lamest curse that can possibly
be passed down through female lineage, it’s a given truth that one day,
my bones will become brittle and break. To this day, I haven’t lost my bone-
breaking virginity, and I personally think it ***** to be twenty-one
and have never had the opportunity to get a cast signed. I drink a lot of milk.

One.*
To this day, I have a fear of home invasion. I suppose I’m more attuned
to the house-settling noises of being alone. If I’ve made a habit of ignoring
all my own bone creaks, they’ll start popping up in other places.
Like knocking on a door that’s already open. Like the way the bed creaks
when I turn over. Like checking the locks when something is already inside.

I swallowed my lunch down the wrong way
and now there’s something in my lungs,
eggs, I think, cracked into little pieces
with the shells all picked out.
I really should have known when I couldn’t breathe
that I was doing this backwards,
but I swallowed anyway, and now when I hyperventilate
it’s like my body is trying to make an omelette.

It sounds so funny. It sounds like everybody
but me is laughing. I mean, it’s a ridiculous idea,
having eggs in your lungs,
but the more I think it’s true, the more I feel them.

I suppose this is divine punishment
for the impossible crime of eating lunch,
for taking those eggs and cracking them straight
into my mouth. There are probably some unborn
chicks thinking, in as much as chicks can think
like we do, that this is divine punishment.
Who gets the last laugh? The abortion does.

And now I’m on the table — medical, not,
you know, the dinner one,
and the doctors are saying that they’re going to cut
something out of me to keep me alive.
If it weren’t for the fact that my mouth
has been sewed up to prevent my own idiocy,
I’d tell them that that’s what I’ve been trying to do all along.

I waterfall my fingers down my throat
and wriggle them like they’re alive,
like I’m nineteen years old again,
trying to prove that I’m the cool girl
with no gag reflex.

The shower runs on boiling hot
and if I stand, I might fall,
so I’m taking the hair-infested plughole
as my date to the dance,
once I’m done with the black hole left in its absence.

My fingers are uncomfortably water-warm
and if I close my eyes, it feels so good,
like the first time I realised there was a clenched fist
inside my stomach that I could begin
to uncurl.

When I think about it, it’s like *******.
It’s something I wouldn’t talk about in Church
and it’s something I should only do behind closed doors.
A lot of things are like *******, in that way,
like being gay, and cutting my own hair, and whatever this is.

It’s a distraction.
It’s something to do when the list of things to be done
is the same every day, when the doors are perpetually
shut and the clenched fist will always be clenched
once rigor mortis has set in.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a worm inside my mind,
I hear it, when it’s nighttime, it has a voice
and that voice tells me to turn my body four times
so that everyone I love doesn’t leave me.

More than that, though, I feel it
right at the back of my skull. It nestles
deep inside and chokes the blood flow away
from rationality, and I clench my fist two times two.

And then it uncurls. I think it is wounded
but it is really just gorging on the compulsion
I have fed it. Again. But the reprieve is glorious
for a moment, until its maw opens back up for more.

Its body is a spiral, contorting thoughts
until I am at its mercy; although it is part of me,
I feel as though I am part of it.
It’s impossible to run away from an attached body.

*One day, everyone you love will die and it will be your fault,
ballet turn, pivot, dance en pointe my darling, again,
walk, walk, walk, walk, there we go, now people are alive.
Now you’re a hero, for a second, for two.

Here we are in the thick of it.

Oh, you didn’t like that, did you?

Almost like clockwork,
the bone breaks. This time,
an arm, a warning
against the things that hands
can do. Cut it off not at the disease,
but at the root.

We hope, this time,
that we were quick enough
in the amputation.
That the disease has spread
no further than the floor
upon which the phantom limb jerks.

Last time, it was slow,
an infestation below the muscle
until the patient was screaming
for morphine. We had to cut
the lower leg first, but the thigh
was already prisoner.

The neuroscience department
has been working overtime
on all the brains we lobotomised
before removal. We’re thinking
that’s where it ruminates,
dormant, like a volcano.

The infection manifests
differently in everyone.
In some, it cries for attention,
and we cut the throat.
In others, it’s violence,
and it ends up killing itself.

There’s not much we know
and even less we can name.
When they brought my body
in, they called it loneliness,
and cut out my heart.
The wolves ate well that night.

The body peels itself
away from the floorboards,
sweat, sticky and slick,
pops like a gunshot
as the skin pulls loose.

Shoulder blades pulsate
as movement returns
once more. “It’s been
a hell of a night,”
the heavy arms creak.

Even in the dark of the room,
the body can sense morning;
the dew on the legs, the cool
floorboards are warming
with the dawn.

There’s something here
about a beginning.
The body
pulls at the skin
and it is still attached —

Meaning, of course,
that the body is a body
once more. Meaning,
of course, that the beginning
has already begun.