When floating on your back, all is well.
It is only when you are drowning that you start to
notice how many of your friends also can't swim.

It is the most wonderful gift to create worlds with your mind and hands - to create these surreal places where you can hide from your tears.

And who would have thought
That it would be here?
Sandwiched into a backseat
Between a sleeping Chinese man
And a dear friend,
Behind a sleeping couple
Lovingly caught in a snoozy embrace
In a cramped Chinese bus
Amidst a bustling buzzing Beijing
As the sun seeped through
A smoggy winter's sky.

Who would have thought
That it would be here?
Being soothed by her playlist -
A sort of modern mix-tape
Full of love and thought
And desperate longing
And lust, more love
And the most intimate
Of gestures.

Who could have thought
That it would be here?
Here, where an epiphany forms,
Against a sea of weather-beaten, weary and reddened faces,
That my darling, sweet Isabelle
Is made of ******* poetry.

‪It's hard to care about women and their silly, little crushes when most people are so painfully boring and you are so transfixed on your own‬

I firmly believe everyone does
Something for a need,
A desire of completion,
Of fulfilment.
I write, hoping the words
Will envelope the hole.

So I spill, I bleed, I fuss,
Pouring out feelings of greed,
Of hurt and frustration,
Of love, contentment -
Plug the emptiness with words
To fix my damaged soul.

‪Every night I cry myself to sleep,‬
‪Feeling your body comfort me.‬
‪My phantom limb, ‬
‪You were never there,‬
‪Yet every night I die in your arms.‬

Depression is having a completely normal day,
Equipped with teacher's mask and a jovial eccentricity
To keep the students bubbling,
Only to leave the train station and catch a glimpse
Of a girl with pink hair -
And just for a few seconds you think it's her,
And she's with somebody else.
Not ditching you for her own mental health,
But ditching you because you're not worthy
(Which is true.)
Ditching you because you couldn't be trusted.
Ditching you because you did something wrong.
And the thirty minute walk home
Seems to take forever longer,
And your stomach pounds and aches
And scrambles to be free of your body.
It craves her like every other part of you -
Your aching brain, your aching hands,
Your aching, aching heart.
You get home and you just want the world to
Swallow you up -
"There's a letter for you."
Maybe it's the citizenship,
Maybe today I catch a break,
An escape from the feelings of emptiness
Pounding my head.
An escape from the feelings of heartbreak,
The anxious catacombs of my brain
Poisoning my beating heart.
Your graduate account is being terminated.
From November you will pay bank charges.
Completely inconsequential.
Not a lot of money.
Why did I start drinking
And why can I not stop crying?

Pandemic
I.
Staring at the empty screens
Of all our ineptitudes,
Our demons whetting whistles,
Our joints atrophied.

Staring at the walls –
Surely not the news.
Can’t bear to look at a mirror anymore.
There’s something deeply unpleasant
Growling back.

Or the pub across the street with its
Christmas lights burning,
And the bar dark as the world was at night
Before we killed it with our fire.

II.
A million hours and a million monkeys
With half-baked ideas and reddening eyes
All trying to pen the next dime novel:
Pandemonium or Apocalypse Today,
Praying pulp doesn’t pulp before being read or read about
By the tired eyes and hands counting
Cheddar and pages and hours,
Until we all clock out.

My contribution to a dying ocean of death –
At least that’s what Bo reckoned
(Among many others drowning)
Is a journey through childhood
And wannabe streams of King and ‘cuntry.’

The old post-colonial riddle:
Can we be sorry for what we’ve done?
Endless masks thrown to the ground
Amongst self-respect and science and what
Used to be described as thought and thinking.
At least that’s what we kid ourselves.

Civilisation was never particularly civil.

III.
Start making the tin foil hats –
We won’t be leaving the house anytime soon.
We’ve a television series to finish scribing –
Eight years down and surely eight more to go.
There’s a four-hour silent French movie to watch
And what about your vegan friend –
Who hasn’t finished his journey to salvation yet?

There’s an endless stream of distractions to go:
You’ve read twenty-five books so far –
And it’s just gone July.
There’s an endless stream of desperation
And an endless stream of angst
And an endless stream of nothing
And death is just the beginning
Of
Your
Nothing.

And as the bard rightly charged:
“Here ain’t no place for dolls like you and me.
Everybody’s on a barge
Floating down the endless stream of great TV.”

So among the burning, we find a seat,
Nestle into that newly worn spot on the couch
And pretend we’re not there.

I need to change the way I live, for I am desperately unhappy. But change is something I fear more than anything. What if it doesn't fix me?

‪There is only so much of your heart‬
‪You can pour before it is just empty,‬
‪And everything you have given‬
‪Just trickles slowly down the drain.‬

You fear she won't feel the same way and then you dispel all doubt as the self-realisation, you simply aren't good enough for her, manifests

‪Do what others need.‬
‪Bury yourself in work.‬
‪Brush until you bleed.‬
‪Drink until you're numb.‬
‪Cry until you're shattered.‬
‪Then sleep may come.‬

Today I walked to the pier
And I stared into the water
And I wrote and I wrote
I wrote nothings and everythings
And I let some tears out
And I reflected and I laughed a bit
And I had a good old think back
Over everything
Over and over again
And I was afraid that if I stopped writing
I would dive in and swim
Until I couldn't swim anymore
And maybe the water was a much more
Fitting death than a leap
From a tall library window
Or one feet first in front of a train
But I'm about to finish writing
And despite all my failures
And disappointments
There's something faint
Telling me to keep going
And I don't know what's worse:
That I don't know what it is,
Or that I so desperately want it to *******.

How am I supposed to cope,
When even the morning sky
Conspires against me?

How do I have a hope,
When over the morning hill
Your pink marshmallow hair
Echoes through the firmament
Of my days?

How am I supposed to cope,
When I can't count the ways
In which you make my heart sing?
My heart ache?
It's more than I can take.

I don't know what it meant,
But a bird with wounded wing
Stumbled through the air
And wobbled towards the train tracks to die.
Well... maybe that's a lie.
I do.

I need to write to stop my head from exploding,
I need to ooze before I scream out loud,
I need to pour my heart out before eroding,
Falling and disappearing in a cloud.

The day was long, and body, brain were aching,
The train was slow, and sleep a welcome craze,
But then I saw her face, and started shaking,
And life became a devastating haze.

She walked right past beside her caring mother,
And didn't say a word or look my way,
I'd do anything to call her my lover
But couldn't know what possibly to say.

I hadn't seen her for a month or more,
For she abandoned all communication
To cure depression, she shut my door,
And left me holding my own devastation.

I'm back at home but don't know how I got here.
I called her but it just confirmed my fears.
She blocked me and I just need to know that she's okay
And that there is a light at the end of the tunnel
Because her depression came sneaking up behind me
And asked if mine would come out and play
And it said yes but only if you drink more
And consider thoughts of dying more seriously this time
And hey look there's the *** we bought
And hey, you're right, you justified my fears
And hey, if she's happy you'd **** yourself just to know
And hey, if not, ******* hell you so desperately want to help
And hey, if you can't, you'd ******* die trying
And hey, I guess this *** is saltier than most
And hey, I guess this does confirm my fears
That the *** goes down as roughly as the tears.

‪It's impossible to find another dream girl ‬
Now that you're gone,
Because it's been almost a month
And I still can't get any ******* sleep.

‪There's no such thing as a happy ending, ‬
‪Only happy chapters soon to cease.‬
‪Even Romeo had brief perfection,‬
‪Before they changed his scene.‬

‪If I can look at the smashed bottles and see the green glass shards illuminate your beauty on the streets, can't you find some beauty in me?‬

‪The loneliness I feel without you‬
‪Stifles like a hug that lasts too long‬
‪On a hot day - Hell, I would do‬
‪Anything for you to hug me that way‬

Retaking the same steps,
Searching for meaning,
Searching for something -
Something more in the memories,
Something more in the feelings
That you made me feel.
Hearing the waves by the restaurant,
On the pier.
Feeling the power of the breeze,
And the cold.
This time I don't have your arm,
Your body to keep warm,
And I think that makes it
The coldest it could be.

‪"Storm's a-coming,"‬
‪As is the nightmare I'd almost forgotten:‬
‪The windows rattling,‬
‪And that godawful wind howling‬
‪At the boy who did wrong.‬

Im drowning myself in work
To stop drowning thinking of you.
Of course, it doesn't work,
But neither does drowning my sorrows
With dark Cuban ***,
When all I can think about
Is how I used to drown in your eyes.
It's hurricane season
And all I can feel is flooding.

‪Deprivation of physical contact is the purest form of loneliness. Since you've been gone I cannot feel anything but deprivation. I need air.‬

‪Finding solace in fondly-remembered films used to be enough. Now they are just a reminder that nothing is the same since you broke my heart.‬

‪Revisiting the campus of my broken dreams,‬
‪And the ghost of my failure:‬
‪You, my love, who works among the trees‬
‪Of my heart's wood, are lost‬

‪To her, the I love yous were cheap.‬
‪To him they were heart and soul.‬
‪He misunderstood why she didn't believe‬
‪That she's what made him whole.‬

‪In a world full of darkness and monsters,‬
‪Is it too much for a man to ask‬
‪To be saved by a princess‬
‪(And perhaps her loyal army of puppies)?‬

Do I fall in love so easily because I enjoy writing poetry, or does a poet within my soul soar to the surface with the ease in which I fall?

Today I watched a man go into the sea to swim with his dog.
The urge to drown myself was perhaps the strongest it's ever been.
It scares me

‪Who'd have thought that pink hair‬
‪Was actually cotton candy -‬
‪I tasted her on my tongue,‬
‪And then she disappeared,‬
‪And now my stomach hurts.‬

It is of this poet's opinion,
That if a poet was to write
Eleven pages worth of poetry
For one heart-breaking woman,
She must be important.

‪Would Romeo and Juliet be any less tragic if, instead of them dying, they could just never see each other again? Just asking for a friend...‬