you learnt I was scared of thunder
and mesmerised by lightning
your freckles had doubled in number
and in the morning we are fighting
the hottest day for months
as the earth tries to sweat us out
I lay naked and sweating also
trying not to shout
leave in ten
no leave in five
or never leave you're always right
so I trundle on a bus
now clothed after my own morning of no fuss
I wonder what the ****
why early morning buck
why calamities and sweaty dagger eyes
cause in your dream
I had been mean
well
I don't know her
and she's not me.

Like a hundred birds fleeing the power lines in autumn afternoons,
You flee the year you have completed and as always the time has passed so soon. There's nothing like the sound of hollow bones beating against the sky, nothing like the feeling of growing older and wondering why?

Scream ***** power,
As you avoid all mirrors
On your way to the shower.
Cold metallic,
Plughole, pathetic.
Scream: "women rule!"
When you scream
Remember the rituals;
As you worship everything about women
But not you.

My sister, soft and kind,
Used to love having her toes dug in the sand.
Myself, I complained;
The sand itched me
And felt as though it ran in my veins.

My sister would purr
About the enigmatic green world all around her.
I stayed indoors.
(I never, though, threw ******* on the floor).

My sister loved to walk:
Pavement, fields, mountains,
She'd walked the East Coast to the West,
Non-stop,
Staying in wind battered farmhouses for rest.

I hated walking.
I would run and hide behind century-old walls
That had crumbled in the middle of moors,
To roll skimpy wet cigarettes
And blow billowing purple clouds.

My sister never smoked,
She did love to smell fresh sticky tobacco, though.

When she had walked the breadth of this island
Her hair had only just grown back.
We played a bit of fantasy,
I pretended to like all these things,
Only for a while,
And only a little late.

I once again complain about the sand,
But now her blood is mixed into that.
And those last tangible bits of her -
The bones ground down -
Sit in the sodden earth
Beneath a with young tree.

I hate all these things.

But my sister,
The bit of her that was actually my mother;
Not all those god awful bits around her,
But her.
That is what I miss.
Not the final six years of miseryy,
Not the world where she came and left,
Not the shadow or impression,
Not the charade we played of loving nature.
But my sister,
My sister,
My sister.

...

The world is still the same:
The sand is still coarse,
That green enigma hasn't changed course,
Those century old walls -
Well, guess what?
They're still on the Moors.

None of those once beloved things,
And there are many I can't face bringing
To mention,
Watched my sister gargle her last breath.
Neither did they sit there years before and recognise
Her body melting and withering away.

I won't love these things in her memory,
They don't deserve that kind of reverie.

My sister was much like my mother,
And like every eldest daughter,
I didn't love or do enough.
But,
Neither did the world.

Summer is soft and sticky.
An ode to the ocean,
Where you drowned at 13
And now I skim the surface
Pretending I'm not treading
Your grave.
Girls & boys play.
I can hear boat engines
Under the water and they're
Humming your name.
I'm glad the salt stings,
I wish the tide could grab,
But the sun,
Oh the villain if there was one,
Warms me too much
To stay long

soft like the powder of first snow,
remember how it burns though.
cold like the metal touch in the morning,
as it warms it bends to your body.
small like the figure of something young,
baby bones crack to grow strong.
sweet like the fresh clip of flowers
and yet thick musk hangs about ours.
dark like the space between two bodies,
light when the colour of our eyes meet and inspect.

empty the space between my fingers,
whole the beat my heart delivers.

wasps
lazily flying around
faux red humming light,
early morning darkness outside.
and they would hold still in your hand:
crawl little up arms,
no buzz,
no sting,
no alarm
to be gently flung out open windows.
one deceased
to be inspected in afternoon soberness -
actually a wasp.
Why were they so slow?
So lazy?
So docile?
Did she tame wasps in red light?
Only the foggy evening can tell.

Good morning or goodbye?
I don’t know which
I just close my eyes.
Remember those four hungover
short,
fast,
lingering,
still in shock
cause what the ****
before you left
you kissed me?

Do you hear water wherever you go?
The hum,
the slosh,
the drum,
the stroke.
Always moving, potentially drowning us slow.
Like how happy people hear music
you hear the tide,
and the moon tugging gently;
you have nowhere to hide.

Not quite the green rolling hills
i’d devour only a few years ago
i’m stuck depending on the
dreary dark alleys, buldings with dessimated feelings,
girls who prance so estatically through
cement pavements and tarmac streets.

How do I feel knowing brick tastes sweet,
smog feels soft, and constant movement relaxes me?
They flourished and thrived,
grew up so different, so industrialised.
A completely different vocabularly that has been bastardised.
Not just trees and meadows
not just red juggarnauts and underground rumbles.

I need to find the sea
just for a moment to wash this off me.

a warm, windy, muggy day
where i have blissfully snoozed the arvo away.
men parade the streets chanting about home,
the football hits the net repeatedly whilst my mind puts on a show.
i am always dreaming of you,
i hate that i do.
not you,
but me,
why have i so suddenly gotten back the capacity to dream?

The sweet and sour taste of four a.m,
when all that can be heard is deep breathing and slight rain.
I lay in a bed that no-one owns,
in a room perpetually cold,
and pretend that my endeavours to educate this blank piece of paper,
that doesn't actually exist in this physical plane,
are not in vain.
But in reality, does the few thousand words that try to define
how we translate cultural films over time,
actually matter?
I think not.
Because every few minutes I have to stop,
just to check that you're breathing, that your skin is still soft,
just to whisper better dreams in your ears.
I'd rather be asleep than sat here.
I'd rather be somewhere that does not exist.
I'd rather be driving down that road,
the one where the bluebells are just opening,
with absolutely no concept of tomorrow.

you could pretend
there’s all the time left in the world
to hold a hand
or watch her toes curl
that days are slow
in their release of hours,
there’s always one more left,
one final hour.

but time is running
and you’re quick to follow
memories are blurring
because days are slipping
and summer will become one long day,
where you started a different person,
a long day where you did everything
where you lost a thousand people
who you’d never dreamed of losing
where you found
and fought
for a thousand more
who you now dream of keeping.

if only time wasn’t running
and we were sitting
in the busy restaurant forever
or laying in an adopted bed
or wearing jumpers you never own
or driving along the infinite country roads.
we are all pretending that
another hour will follow
time is running
and we wish we could walk along forever.

sleeping in the dark
always makes me nervous;
an aversion
to curtains
i like to watch the stars
glide across the ocean of infinite nothing
hear screaming lone cars
and cats colliding
a solitary dog bark
as my mother sighs in the dark.

the sun cannot decide
if it is good enough to show
so it ducks and dives and hides
behind black clouds that will not go

you are a light breeze
and i am a complete thunderstorm
how many times have you cried?
i don't say this to misinform.
you are not mine
and now i think i'll be fine
one summer
in how many more to come?
one summer left
to just have fun

a whir heard at work
and when the lit end of a cigarette burns.
the trees are dead
and yet the doors are still open.
an atrocious haircut
such a misfortune.
hook nose talks to ill-fitting jeans,
tender child
shattering scream.
and I will not recall standing here in my twenties.
a boy will converse with me
and I realise that humanity is generally friendly
realise that hate and envy
are probably just pretending.
he drinks the water
and for a second I imagine kissing
aren't we all pretending?
how can you validate an emotion
that lurks on a spectrum
with no shared connection?

I thought I had fallen in love when I was sixteen,
He never meant a word he said
And I tried not to let
Him touch me.
Until I was on the floor
In a room I don’t visit any more.
Who knew
That things could grow
Inside of you.

clouds look like entire worlds yet explored;
they are peaking in the distance
in mountains of more
drifting off into a blue eternal
they were there.

as morning rises they gather
colliding into another
forming foamy waves
following the tides
the wind that exhales them
moving only forward.

and in the middle age of day,
after the glory of youth has passed
there is no cloud to dampen
or form shadows on your path.
just an endless azure
that strikes hope, and fear
at the inevitability
of forever.

when days wane
and bleed their golden life
the sun falls
and clouds form again, this time
to capture the falling blood
and project the colours of desire
as red, purple and blushing pink
paint the white of worlds,
don’t blink,
before the colour swirls
and darkness falls
upon this world of all.

There is a field where
I have never been;
I could only have visited it
In a dream.
Where sunsets surf the
wild flower grass,
hot air balloons traverse
a sky that has been cursed,
to endow a setting a sun.

Escaped the family cries
caused by family ties,
under a thundering air path
as easy jet flies over us.
Bumblebees are caught in traffic
over mists of summer haze.
I don't think I have ever been more in love,

with a place.
Purple flowers bloom under an eye,
pale Cowslip stretched over each bone.
Even the sky has darkened to a fathomless depth
in which I cannot help but drown.
Where am I now?

Tomorrow it will rain here,
wash away the summer scents,
wash away the golden light
and the very sense of a past held tight.

Could this place be any better?
What if I had to remember
a different voice,
a different shape
to frame the end of my favourite day?

I am civil and undisputed. I am yet explored and ill-reputed. I have been broken and stitched together. I will fall but not forever. I have walked the length of a mind. I have been driven crazy by what's repressed inside. I am tortured by a need to touch you. I am saved in the morning by something new. I am overdone and yet opened. I am caught in judders, trapped in emotions. I am finished but not spent, I am done but haven't even started yet.

"Perfection"
Should be a profanity
Consigned to myth
We are taught to aspire
To live a life
That doesn't exist.
Glossy paper
And saturated colour
Feeds us a fiction
Force asphyxiation
Because you will live average
Statistically
And will not become
The thing of dreams
Staring out of magazines.

a perfect half hour drive
with a perfect sunset keeping me high
and a perfect soundtrack buzzing
in my perfect battered car
down a perfect country lane
lined with green waves
and soft bluebells
smudging the hard lines of winter away
the air is still cold
but this evening is too perfect
to notice
or care
and i realise i have been driving
with a smile greeting stranger's stares.

nothing is ever finished
do not believe in the definitive
life is a spectrum
black and white exists
to those who live fixed
wander
grey is the colour
of a question
that has no answer.

The mountains are never lonely
as they are kissed by lilac clouds.
Painted by a setting sun,
spectators of beauty,
a part of beauty themselves.
Free of responsibility, or any need to call
on why the sun rises and then falls;
the mountains live a perfect life
a life of no troubles.

There are emotions that have no words
and instead become motions
and drunken slurs.
We are fooled into believing
that every tragic feeling
is a wound to be healed
or a cry to be heard.

I am adrift
upon a sea that
always returns to kiss
the broken shore.
No matter how hard the two collide
she always returns for more.
I am stranded
upon this constant tide
that perpetuates a heartache,
for no matter how hard I try
I cannot become the foam of waves
I cannot return time and time again to kiss that perfect stony face.

The sea is in love with the shore
but must always pull away.
Only to return once more
with the thundering embrace
of a thousand soft lipped waves.