In all the time we’ve wandered,

spent landing from impossible heights;

dancing blind, in the dark, being fumbled and prodded

for feelings and requests,

the games we laugh at, wasted on self-confidence and

possession

I have much more than yours,

intoxicated on the thriving pulse of fearless flight,

we crash into opened arms,

not noticing the extent of the fall.


A wandering soul, I shall be.

Picking up sand on empty beaches,

spending time thinking of the footsteps,

surely imprinted on my trail I left behind.

You came and went.

And so you came and went.

Tumbling across my path,

like that cooling hot flush brought with salty ocean and rain.


Wandering past empty mountains,

looking over my shoulder to notice the

mortal statues I made of you,

and you,

and you,

my tended garden of people and places and things;

of darkness and light;

of scraped shells and glorious feathered wings;

of sickly love songs and hearts blazed;

of lonely nights waiting up for you,

and all the times you let me down.


Wandering alone and free,

the purple skies above offering sacred slumber.

I remain awake, watching stone eyes move

on me,

fixating on the bumps in the road,

tremors and falls in gentle dips unexpected

under my feet;

like you were.

Another came past, the smell of cut roses and

blushes minus a make-up brush;

shaking in the middle of your field of games,

playing rough and *****,

feeding ego and primal instincts,

bent backwards and underneath,

an empty canvas for marred drawing;

it was ****** while it lasted,

but I turned to stone long before

you came back on your knees.


And all the time I’ve wandered this lonely escape,

I come to wonder at all my marvels,

the things that made you fall faintly for me,

and shrines of you,

and you, and you.

Whether we were meant to collect an exhibition

of second best loves;

successive wilting romances burnt on scorching days.

Whether we were meant to learn by breaking hearts;

making cold remnants left to mildew in the past.


Whether we make do with second best,

as close to first yet farther still;

because we don’t know what best is.

We know when it tumbles down,

like a broken house,

but to see it gone is much too late.

Safer to say yes to second best,

than risk the cold wandering left for us alone.


In all the times we’ve spent wandering.

And I’m still wandering.

Empty beaches and purple skies,

long past.

A warmth I can’t equate

to anything that

blossomed and I could touch as real

in my life to date.

Watching an ocean dance at twilight,

shifting and settling into myself;

a return home

after a long retreat.

Filled as much as one can,

living in a partly broken glass.



A warmth I can’t equate,

that smile that kept the streetlights,

still humming on their own,

late at night.

An absolute joy,

to see me,

that kept the sands still and made

the waves unafraid to keep crashing on.

The light brightening settling eyes,

on me,

like the happiest moment

of any day,

is when I’m right there,

walking along your way.

A warmth I can’t equate,

settled side by side

wrapped in fresh air and

twinkling planets high above,

breathing down a clear night,

on souls forever fixed

in an achingly sweet moment;

watching paths cross,

almost collide,

with words of love and loyalty,

grace, beauty, adoration, bliss,

transfixed on the glimmering promise

of single coloured roses

as gifts

for a sweet girl

you say

and a whimsical romanticism not dead.



A warmth I can’t equate,

how unearthly beautiful

you let me feel

in your eyes;

love professed on empty beaches,

showered attention on a

long-time lonely girl

you melted and folded

into a goddess.

Love professed

for a patched-up

lady singing melodies,

and holding herself together

with decisions scorching her back,

confused nettles of feelings and

obligations, allowances,

grievances and sadness

bearing a weight on her slender shoulders;

She’s a creature holding aloft all the

wonders and hearts of decisions left to face.



A warmth I can’t equate,

as I am

the protagonist always

failing to make the right decision,

lost and redeemed and burdened

in every instalment;

no one has made me feel as wondrous

and special,

in all the times I’ve had lovers sit before me.

But this protagonist,

has not had the greatest

trove of romances, nor the heart

to carry much more fears;

pieces are given away,

in every extended touch and heartbeat,

so please beware,

what’s left.



A warmth I can’t equate,

right now, lost in every state,

but hope I can at least reciprocate,

in some way after healing has mended

and stitched

and time has played it’s course to warm cold feet.

This lady is afraid,

of how quickly you might have fallen,

for all her wise, sad songs.

A sweet, unsettling fantasy made reality.



But she knows.

Of this warmth.

No one can really equate.

Tensions high,
like broken kite strings,
reaching further away,
escaping the empty earth
in your arms.

Creeping chatter,
pouring inky letters,
in runny messes
all over my hands,
feeling bruised by you;
the sting, the slap
as leaking words
drip drip drip
from your mouth,
the broken tap.

I’m tired.
I’m so tired of hearing
soft
whispered yearnings
scratching the back of your throat.
Desperation, loneliness?
You beg with the croon in your tone,
you play along like the gentle little
sweetling,
a songful, humming love,
all warm in cupped hands.

In all this time,
this achingly long time
I’ve played as your neat little trick;
the showman’s trusty pet,
small dove flying
as soon and only when you release me.
String caught up around my waist,
I’ll never fly too far.

As I walked away,
that night with the moon trailing my form,
and pooling in pillows cradled in my soft footsteps,
you watched my back
stretch lean and tall and
stand
away from you.
You looked back,
it was the moon shifting through my hair,
when I turned to notice
a head shake,
a blink in the empty settling air you left behind.

….Drip….drip….drip,
you leak all those notions I wished you
would one day say,
those heart-melting flatteries,
desirable admissions,
I’m the only one you want,
to keep you satisfied,
keep you going and touching and loving
and exploring and breaking,
until your other girl comes home.
You ask and plead and return,
lapping and licking in my arms,
wanting my form so bad again;
you cry for all the fun in the world,
but this time, it just can’t.

You’re just my broken tap.
You’d need to stop dripping ***** water one day.
You’d need to stop echoing around me at night,
cradling myself to keep my strength enough
to say no to what I wanted and got for so long.

But you’re just my delicate and lovely broken tap.
I’ll always love you somehow, and feel so dangerous,
intoxicating and breathtaking
as you made me so.
You showed me so.
But I can’t wait for you to cease on your own.
Pull me round with you, wait for you,
tossed like an empty drink because of you.

Maybe
I just need to let you
let me go.
Like I cried to let you go first.

We found ourselves in
a sticky
sticky mess
didn’t we?

We can be so intimate,
because I hate making my walls
from already crumbled bricks and
clay of wilted loves,
the dredge and slurries of everything that went wrong
plasters together the insecurities I hide from,
to protect you from.

You didn’t even build the offence I expected,
to prompt my building, my construction and strategy and
internal combat.
I didn’t have to crouch at your feet,
long forgotten how to feel for myself.
So mastered at letting you take over my body,
make it move with you where you need it to be,
matching ecstasies and heartbeats
and sweat and moans,
feeling you aroused,
secretly wondering if I was made of stone.

It took one touch
to do it.
Just one hopeless exploration of two bodies,
for me to return to my shrivelled husk,
tearful and vulnerable and exposed for all the others,
tainted parcel, envelope turned inside out,
only wishing to be your absolute perfect,
in and out of bedsheets and
the expectations we see peeking out of the shade,
******* us and ruining us as we go.

But you make it seem all ok.
You make that one shadow in my past,
turn me into something else entirely.
It still bothers me, plays me, screws me over and over
until I break a little because it’s just to much trauma to overcome.
Being used for little night-time, quickened searchings,
finding out what people always want from me,
and what they are happy to leave behind them,
with me.

I’ve always known about emotions.
But I don’t think it’s ever been this easy to feel them.
To feel that rise and fall of a wave people keep ranting of.
Because of you, I get it now.
It makes me see stars and feel everything hit at once.

It’s always a start that ages before it’s time.
It’s always the nerves that settle under my skin,
bumps and bruises and dead hour wanderings,
waiting for the inevitable moment it all ends.
As soon as you like me, I start to panic.
I can’t sleep and eat waiting for that little rattle,
pop shake
of when you pick up the phone and make my panic real.

I can only believe you for a day.
I can only like you for for a day at a time.
I can only show you what I am for a day at a time under very
rational considerations.

To feed you until you want me no more.
You can scrunch up your eyes and turn to plead you would never,
but having been a lot of messed-up lovely things to a lot of people,
I know you are a human emotional puddle.
And they were all human too.

And all our time together
becomes a heartfelt plea,
the heavy, pressure-on-chest of hope
that no one ever warns you about,
of the dangers of letting yourself go
with them
that special person
feeling everything you strive so hard to suppress
given over to trickster hands and laughs
of those emotions you fear.

We don’t regret it.
Not at all.
But all our movements and affections are
dictated expiry dates,
and I hate it being about us needing
to consume as much of each other
before the time ticks over and
it’s all spoiled.

So this solidifies where I am,
where I am coming from,
when I curl up next to you.
This is my flagged position,
in this strategic push-pull, give-take, want-relinquish
games we desperately seek to play.
I’m always the loyal friend, crying when you close a door on me,
or leave me aside,
or throw me away for someone, something new.

So instead
for now,
I’m going to remind myself of all the things one day could be true.
And get a little lost in you,
because that’s all I can do.

It’s that or I’m going to have to watch you walk away,
and hope I feel this rollercoaster again.

I want to let you in.

On a little universal secret.

We are an exhausted pool of all the little blind, maddening

instances we confuse ourselves with;

over people and instances and places left unexplored,

for us who feel the weight of lead limbs dangling limp from

the craving of sleep;

patient waits cut short in frustrating moments of self-pity and loss,

bereft and lonely over insatiable appetites.

Over friends we keep only to abuse,

lovers never giving enough but taking everything wrongly advertised;

the needle driven deep under skin after seeing jealousies dance,

float like unreachable things,

taunt and play and roast your heart in an oven,

cooking in the promise of eventual redemption.


I want to let you in.

On a little universal secret.

Being caught alive wrapped in shrouds of your own

faint darkness is miserable.

As a flower feels the warmth of sunlight,

so quickly it droops to meet the rough earth.

We are a maddening crowd ticked off at always

being second best, runner up, participation award;

jilted contestants,

competitors making allies and lovers, sequential,

in an ongoing battle of self and image and

all the ****** up soliloquies we recite with rough tongues

to an imaginary audience of our selves and their incessant advice.


I see your facade.

And i’ll challenge it every time.

Don’t think you have never heard the whispers circling;

don’t think you go home to shut all these truths inside a box of your own,

don’t think everyone else does too.

It seems like a sordid, unfair jibe, between the ribs and spikes in your head,

to wish you were that one perpetually fortunate, lucky, charismatic creature we

worship in our private dark;

we all worship each other.

And that’s where all our collective monsters feed on us poor, poor

struggling souls.


I want to let you in.

On a little universal secret,

that you can only deny so long.

There are many of us, made to feel few,

hidden in millions and billions of tight springs

that only gather so many more of these confusing thorns.

I’m talking about us,

the ones that have to leave a ‘do not disturb’ sign

inked on our foreheads when we disappear to somewhere else

because we have to. As far as we can.

We are the people who fight for conversation first,

and always back away first not because we want to

but because our minds are thick, and sore, and so

exquisitely filled with self-deprecating jargon and patched, sewed

stitched in places clumsily,

a surgeon not paying close attention,

that fails to keep the muck from seeping out.

The pressure in our heads that makes teeth grind, eyes tear,

mouths shut dry and parched, a surge of nausea

a general lingering present future lasting feeling of unsettling nerves;

sparking blossoming dull throbs of hurt that make us bow our heads

half in physiological need and half in the self-fatigue we feel

fighting ourselves every time we rise to a challenge.


I take my meds, I think things over.

I take my meds, I think things over.

Repeat until you’re tongue-tied.


All my friends are getting wasted,

and i’m feeling lonely getting self-wasted with them.

We know abandonment like no others,

because even our minds leave us for a time,

even our very selves walk away from us like broken lovers,

hurt friends, empty strangers, sworn enemies

it lays ambush to our patterns of self, lightness,

trodden leaves melting slowly into the ground like

the cycle back to dirt and lowness again.


This is half my little secret.

But I’ll tell you in time if you’re ready.

So now I’ve let you in.

On our little universal secret.

A time,

sometime before the last time,

or even a little more lost

in a dusty box

the time even before,

I wanted to tell you something, sweet.


When you press against my skin,

or hold me at length,

you are wearing, shredding,

tearing and smoothing my very

surface.

I wear myself upon my skin;

internals are external,

I don’t hide behind mirrors or imagery;

magic tricks, pops of champagne,

dazzling details or embellished,

encrusted, coated

and processed

goods.


Those who are privileged;

ungrateful and cursed with ignorance,

little awareness for the multiplied demons nesting

in blackened hearts,

sipping sour emotions and rancid feasts,

those are the people who hide what doesn’t need to be hidden.


Those who are privileged;

independent and cursed with anxiety,

pressure behind their eyelids at night

and a very heavy head to move and keep

the walls up, guarding against the terrors and the screams

and the glistening shadows, slick with grief and

self-pity, self-loathing and what people judge

as an infernal mental contagion,

but really is just an unfortunate, battle of imbalance and chemicals.

Awry and lost and deep trodden in a mind that never rests,

always misses a beat chasing other beats

and fearing the biggest monster in the fields called mistake.

Those are the people who wear it all like skin, coloured by bruises and patterned

with cuts, carvings,

soothing over the outside and deciding its already faulty,

can wear it on the outside because its already broken,

not really worth protecting

and don’t hide would could and would mostly be hidden.


Sweet,

this is me.

I’m rough, I know.

I rest

in your bed

when I’m scared of being alone with myself.

Depressed again and as I lose control,

realising I never really have an end

keep pounding and chipping at

every word I’ve ever though and every feeling

I’ve ever had to succumb to,

I’ve ever always had to feel,

sending for help and working on strength to rebuild,

shoots flares in a black blanket of sky;

lending your little demons the opportunity

to find you.


Jealousy is the most dangerous form of punishment for us.

Me.

These people that we are.

We crave respite, sweet.

Out of earth and mind and here and now,

out of beats and taps, clicks and repeats.

Out of straddled cycles and digging into ourselves with

our own fingernails.

But really, I can’t call you sweet.

You’re just the person I imagine

so I’m never caught alone with myself.

You’re just the person I want for myself,

and can’t reach towards, afraid and corrupt and broken to you.


Blacking out with my eyes open.

A blank space, a blank knot and a blank guess,

rolling over inside.

Short-term memory shot.

Feeling the weight

and the hatred of my omnipresent self,

mind disheveled, unraveled,

fighting a battle you can’t even see;

takes one to know one.

I deal with my pain,

no one else digging enough to find a spring,

land-locked and bone dry,

questioning the mirage I stumble through a desert for.


Questioning what real is,

something everyone can pick and grasp,

smoky cloud and bitter wind to me.

I try and see some reasons,

stumbling in the finding

of plain ground, nothing else.

Perpetually uninvited yet constant host,

parasite,

addicted to everyone else’s company.

Asymptomatic to symptomatic,

mind the bickering beast,

same person, same bodysuit,

but I,

I’m locked inside with you,

yet watching you wreak your havoc,

vicious, bitter monologue ringing wall to wall,

grating and wailing and driving me broken

and twisted and pinned like your own art.


This is what I wanted to tell you,

eventually.

When I noticed a break in the internal racket,

a clear view from my cell into yours

I realised nobody wants to hear about this abuse,

not even you;

avoid, ignore, pretend it isn’t real so you can sleep

alone in your cell just one more night, again.


I just want people to better understand what this is like.

Why I simply can’t explain it.

Why I can’t tell you.

Why you will run.


Now here’s your cue.

Stand up and

Walk out on me.

Nights of thinking alone,

gathering my proofs,

I’m still unsure you were real.


I loved the sweet caress of your voice,

the way your mouth shaped my name,

your eyes hovering lazily over mine.

I loved the soft touches and frenzied hands,

as you carried and explored me, explored together

in bed sheets and a summer night’s heat.


Balcony doors embraced the ocean with open arms

before us, the tingle of adventures together

left tickling my skin.

It was a night that brought so many gifts, so many

tender looks and sprawling affections

laying waste to the floor.


But it was a night left to my fantasy.

No videos, photographs, Facebook statuses

or afterwords of gratitude.

A night left as bundles of touches and

portions of tangled desire beautifully coiled like

ropes inside my head.


I need those proofs.

I need to know that love-nest even happened.

That it wasn’t some sickened dream I had,

whilst I cried in bed alone that it would soon

all end;

a frayed and ***** heap of pity left in place of you.

My heart would conjure anything to protect me from you.

My heart would drill holes in those fragments if it meant

lies from you, if it meant little pieces of love you could

hurt me with.


My heart is grateful for what you showed me,

the love you painted with me, for me, over me.

My heart is still in love with the times we shared,

the memories that glide around silkily in my sleep;

but my heart is also still frightened, of you.

And what power I gave you, over me, to make me

weep and search for evidence like this.

To finally know you loved me, or not.


Because that is what it needs doesn’t it?

Prove that it needs to, that it’s real.

Were you real beneath my fingers?