the tenderest thing. the tenderest thing.
is stumbling
in the hollow between
life's collarbones. it feels just like
velvet.

innocent. a moment.
crushed-soft, caught you unaware.
as vulnerable as hot
breath
alighting on your neck. his
fingers lacing round your ribs.
a moment.

innocent.
placing lunch plates in the sink
getting washed by sunlight instead.
a glow on metal
so bright, so clean
you think of a baby's skin.
warm.
like love.
like love exists
in everything.

the tenderest thing. the tenderest thing.

alone and awake
pressing a small silver coin
between sky and glance

The air burns where I sleep;
you trudge in almost-snow.

The resetting of alarm clocks
let the wind slip
through your dreamcatcher.

And my sunset is all
the colours of your fall.

I write a poem;
you will awaken six hours
and countless miles later

in the cold
while I burn.

The ink lies between
the segments of the universe;
unreachable,
incomprehensible

in the fire
while you shiver.

What is it to miss
someone?
I do not know.

You've been crying into your pillow for weeks now
because he-

Never mind.

Today, you walked into a grocery store
and stared
at all the people
buying broccoli and shampoo and dish-washing liquid.
All those people with their own
chapters and textures,
their own loves and hates and
personal heartbreaks,
all their embarrassing habits.
Mundanely gathered in this over-lit shop...
You realize that for this short while
all your lives were quietly mingling.

And then your heart sighs
with relief because
you've done it, finally.
You've realized something small but so very
important.
It's quite simple, really.

The world is larger than your heartbreak.

(You smile because you know that things just might be okay.
Eventually)

i am strong.
i clutch my ribs on certain nights
because i might split open -
i might even spill.
my fingers stay tight
to keep me stitched.

i am weak.
i seal my tears in a jar,
let it sour and congeal.
i take my success
hard.
i love
unruly

you do not need to fit in their beautiful
because it lies
that one size fits all.

you were not made
so powerfully, so tenderly,
so naturally
to smooth yourself into
a magazine cutout.

remember
you are not a puzzle piece.
the only place you need to fit
is inside that skin of yours.

'What shall we talk about today?'

Spin, spin, spin the conversation
into loops and recapitulations.
Cassettes were my sustenance but
a vinyl record spins on the turntable.
Won't you tell me what song is playing right now?
Rests, then
    block chords, then
          swing-swung rhythm.
Then,
unexpected concords.

Where did those blue notes come from?
And colour our red, some supposed red, into
purple?
But jazz has always been unpredictable.

I grew up on the clarity and
gravity
of soft pink time;
pearl-notes to the steady, steady,
steady
beat of a metronome.
But now,
                now?
Syncopation.
My  
      beat
against your
                beat
and we make a violently violet
bossa nova.

Suddenly the classically trained flautist
has time-travelled to her very first lesson.
Because no sound flutters out of the mouthpiece
and her fingers can't keep up.
Swing-swung
            syncopation
and she doesn't know to breathe anymore.
Where did those blue notes come from?

Silence.
Have we reached the final double bar?
The cadence is imperfect,
                                             unresolved.
Listen, a cold snap of instant jazz
knocked us over.
Arms clasped, teeth chat-chat-
                                              chattering.
1,
     2,
3 -
A not-quite waltz.
But jazz has always been unpredictable.

Won't you tell me what song is playing right now?
I think we know what it is but can't figure it out.
And so Cole Porter and Billie Holiday save us
from
     fading out.

'Let's do it, let's fall in-"

I don't want this song to be over.
I don't even know what it's called
but
don't let it end, don't let it,
don't
        don't
don't.

I can't cook but I think
I can make  
                   instant jazz.
And you,
        and you...
You'll write dizzy like
a Coltrane solo.
As you do.
And I'll lay down my flute,
struggle out of my red minuet and
                                               wonder:
Where did those blue notes come from?

But jazz has always been unpredictable.

'What shall we talk about now?'

You send me a song every Wednesday,

a soul offering; a slice of the strange radioactive
lunatic madness -
love-
growing inside your wonderland.
(It is not a cancerous tumour, please stop calling it that.)
You say it is dark, the Arctic's lover;
I say it is dark, like
velvet punk music and
stained checked shirts and
almost-blood wine (in shared glasses); like
the colour of your skin.

Come on.
We've both been more fascinated by the depths of the ocean
than the blue glass surfaces.
Isn't that why we fell into bottomless black holes and called it
love?
Isn't that why we branded ourselves poets,
seared the red hot poker labels onto our backs,
so that we wouldn't have to say we're just
sad...?

Yes, we are carefully disintegrating;
the world already gave us a head-start
by curling our spines into the snakelike 'S'
It was preparing us
for our careful meandering
into a river mess:
living.

No doubt, in the pool depths of African evenings,
you drink,
*****-tinged cereal or tea,  
the glass Roobios surface reflecting
a lover's face and the boredom of sadness.
No doubt, I drink to you,
coffee or warm milk,
to try and wake myself into
dying without a purpose.
No doubt, we both drink
the night itself.
And let it fester in our veins,
to curdle our blood into that same wine-shade of
darkness.
We drink.

Virginia Woolf had courage,
Sylvia Plath had courage,
Ernest Hemingway had courage,
you and I don't.
We are too fearless to live.
So we drink
and clutch at each other desperately
without reaching out a single finger.
We form shotguns with our hands, make pacts, go
home again.
And drink.

We are helping each other to die
and live
at the same time.
We are helping each other to try fit the day
too
into our arteries.

You send me a song every Wednesday;
this song will save our existence.

Paris: immutable
permanent marker
dream.

I love you like
the giddy sparkle-crack,
irrational love
found in picture-book fairy tales
I outgrew by
13. You are
my desperate idealism
romanticized into sepia wallpaper
on my laptop screen so
hi there.
Hi, Eiffel Tower.
I think I know your contours
better than a man knows the outlines of his lover but
Paris.
My feelings run
still.
Stiller than still, like
blood gone cold
in love's deep-freeze,
I'm fixated.

Paris, you've got
a residence permit
without an expiration
date
to live in the red beating
city
within me
where no boy has ever kept up his rent and
what,
           what
what does that say about me?
That I reach out my arms to
a rose-tinted Google image
rather than a
tangible embrace waiting for me at my
locker every day.

Why can I serenade you
but not even speak about him?

Paris, I don't think...
I don't think I should love you so
fairly.
For you are my soul investment
but we won't breakeven.
And they warned me,
Paris, they warned me
that you are most beautiful in the rain.
How gorgeous, how
dangerous,
in this age of acidity.

You do not need me
when countless 'artistes'
make love to you
on camera rolls, ivory keys, second-hand
typewriters of silk-faced men.
You do not need me.
Even history has shaped you
into an evenly symmetrical heart
on the map.
You do not need me
but I gorge myself on your
romance
to keep me sane.

Who needs therapy when there's the Champs-Elysées?

And I know that you're crumbling
like, God, yes, the pastries in your abandoned patisseries. I
know that you're crumbling
beneath pink candy wrappers and Casablanca
scene imitations so
that's why
they say you disappoint.

My aunt had a suite at the Ritz but
emailed to tell me
about the soot-stained post office
on rue-this or rue-that and
what,
         what,
what does that say about you?

Is that why they took
all the locks off your eternal bridge,
discarded each love-tale
attached to your hinges
because you were
                               heaving?
Vomiting out love because
it was over-indulgence, like
you'd stuffed yourself on red velvet cupcakes
to find you couldn't digest all that romance and
Paris,

I'm holding you tightly.

My feelings irrationally match
with some product with a price-sticker that reads
'true love'.
Did I tell you I cherish your flaws?
The smoke snuck on buildings and
vines like
veins
bleeding honeysuckles onto windowpanes
and brusque sandwich orders
in some seedy cafe.

I want to crawl
into your chinks and spaces,
make little dark coves
in each little gap where
I can sit and
read.
I can read.

I can read you.

Paris, you are
the postcard that never
came in the mail
but I somehow found
in an empty drawer one day and
I love you.

Paris, I love you.
I'm writing it now but
in some beautiful future,
I'll tell you in person.

home was grandiose in the poems
so it didn't exist.
it had to be fantasy
where there weren't tears on your tuxedo
but the alcohol stains of acceptance. and love?
love couldn't fly away on an aeroplane;
love stayed.
and clouds didn't swell into
empty promises; they
gathered their things and rained.
yes, you don't believe in home anymore
but god, you miss it.
so you'll drink beer at the ballet and pretend
that home is in the poems you've written today.

i cut all the strings

so why am i still
your marionette?

She warns herself
to cork the wine tangling
up all her breaths.
She doesn't want to drown,
she doesn't want to guess.

But she does,
she does.

She realizes,
nauseous, breathless,
that she's stopped looking for stars
in the sky,
but has begun to search for them
in wine glasses and
a boy's eyes.
She desperately doesn't want to. Desperately.

But she does,
she does.

Her mouth is smeared with
straw-gold honesty
because in the morning
it'll be crimson again -
a scarlet as sharp as a
poison dart.
So right now, she enjoys the pale golden.
Fizzing from her mouth and
coursing through her shaking hands and
enveloping her and the lost boy beside her
like a red and blue coat that they can't shake off.
She wants to say:
This is the winter of our denial.
Of our everything and anything and whatever it is,
this thing we can't name.

But she doesn't,
she doesn't.

The Chardonnay isn't
golden enough for that.

All it can gurgle out is:
Don't do it, don't do it.
It'll mean something.

And she listens,
she listens.

She walks back out into the cold night
because she must.
And she collapses into herself
like stars and galaxies do, don't they?
In the morning, she'll paint some false sunshine
onto her face again.
And pretend she isn't bruised all over,
all red and blue,
golden and crimson.

i thought

i was more his
than my mother's

as he shouted at me
as i shouted
to him

lost
behind angry.

Their poetry imperceptibly
slipped
into the first person.

Neither of them noticed
when
'he and she'
became
'you and me'

Let's analyse that, shall we?

five minutes can fit
a magnum opus of sound
between them
so believe me when i say
this
five minutes can make
a shotgun out of our two
glances
like the thickness of honey
squirted into a glass
five minutes are viscous
slowing time into drips that
entrench sweet shrapnel
of this miracle bullet
in our hearts and our
heads.

five minutes
between us

we're in love and we're
dead.

How strange and violet and giddy
that you are a boy
and I am a girl,
and we sit here, there,
you with Plath and I with her lover,
pretending, pretending,
pretending-
they are not the poets.

It is you, the boy,
and me, the girl,
writing to each other.

I want so badly to feel
not just know
the life living within me.

Cells of my heart,
what makes you stay
and stick
and love
in such efficient harmony?
What are the series of
coincidences
constructed into miracles
by some invisible hand
to let you be?
What are you, how are you?
To drop and fall into one -
pulse-
compelling me, luring me
to breathe, breathe
even under the anaesthetic of sleep.

I crave to know
how my body cups my soul
in a mirrored glass and not
a casket
or cage, if I wish.

And why the soul cries
even so,
so

I speak
to the ever and ever lying beyond the sky.
I ask

Please?

Dreams break and lines break
but don't let
my heart break

into me.
It is living.

And I don't yet know
what that means.

I'm 'sophisticatedly' sticking a pen
in my mouth, pretending
to smoke a cigarette.
I don't have the courage to hurt
myself, but
I do.
In 'subtle and implied' ways, he
says.

I make watery coffee and convince
myself, my happiness
lies in there,
floating. And I pretend
I'm in a Parisian cafe.
But these are pipe-dream dregs,
nothing else.
I guess they can't substitute the
vividness of being,
living.
Of sharp technicolour experience that can be
smelt.
Dregs, indeed.

Today, I borrowed Birthday Letters by
Ted Hughes from the library.
I'm wondering if
salvias were his favourite
flower.
His favourite.
I can't figure it out.
For his words are only stricken,
messy with the rawness of
too-technicolour experience.
Beautiful.
But sharp
enough to pierce and
poison,
like Paris.
My Paris, your Paris,
our little Paris.
So startlingly, breathlessly
red.

I suddenly know why I have written this.
The colour of salvias,
of Paris,
of me and you,
is my soul's favourite.
His favourite.
And salvias, their fragrance, it
douses the fire that's threatening to
suffocate, swallow my
life whole,
incomplete.

Red is my favourite colour.
And it's yours.

But I really don't think I want it to be.

la poésie est une manière de créer la
distance

où l'amour
entre nous
est trop pur

somewhere
between 4 and 15,
your innocence was lost
in the angles of your cheeks

and the hardness
of your dreaming
wore itself down
like bark on a tree

now you're standing on an edge
looking over at the sea,
with softer hips and aeroplane feelings;
you know
that you are leaving

somewhere
after 4 and 15,
you learned to be gentle,
to hold yourself
more carefully

you were
a flightless bird.
you are
a girl, becoming
woman, turning
over her dreams
like tea leaves.

you know
that you are leaving
somewhere
behind.

let me tell you
the sky was a piece of cardboard.
i was 16, painting
it black.
something precocious.
a beginner at beautiful.

i sat under this night i created,
waiting for someone like you
to nod and hold my my head and
tell me, tell me, tell me
you're it, you're all the ocean rushed into one
you're it.

oh i never believed in you.
nor the black night which was just black
cardboard but you
came along anyway -
ambling in and i didn't understand
if you were carrying light bulbs or not
whether they were burnt out or not,
whether this was still darkness.

but we talked.
and spoke and thought and
talked. we talked.
our words became
pinholes
pricked into the cardboard.

and i saw it then
for what it was
but i tried to hold the darkness, tried
to pull the blindfold tighter.
i saw it

a blackboard
dotted with white chalk.
the sequins on my birthday frock.
handfuls of glitter
spilling through a net.
i saw.

how we filled the night with stars.
how we didn't know what it was.

yet we wrote
we would remember.
how strange, how rare, how true.
our hands enfolded
we punched the roof.

look,
a hole.
some light.

a moon.

let me tell you
the sky in fact is
blue.

a rainfall of words
skittering delicately
on mind-stained pages

I wish I had told you
when even the stars had been
too cold to breathe, that
yes,
you are my disaster.

See, your hurricane blew out
the paper-candle-sun I'd so
precariously perched
back in January
for warmth and solitary
subsistence.
Instead, you dragged me out
into harsh, hot, white
spotlight,
my hand grabbed in yours,
with your series of purple and then more
purple verses,
while I resisted the fact that
that
I wanted, want
wanted, want
to be more
than fodder for your poetry.

You may not comprehend
the catastrophe conjured
by your hands, your words
but I know myself.
I've always lived on the
edge of disarray and I
think I relished,
relish
my mania
because now I'm
stilled.
Stilled.
Wagon wheels stuck
in African mud,
halted
by stop signs of
violet violent violet
velvety verses.

Now I'm cowering under blankets
for artificial warmth,
with my thoughts
and a book, all clad
in the ghosts of your hands, I've been
stilled.
You've thrown silence
into the life of a musician.
You have scratched the vinyl
to break the song into pieces,
stop
stop
Caution.
This is a broken record.

Stilled.
If you are a hurricane,
then I am a bigger blossoming wreck,
still
you have managed to do it -
stilled.

All I want is to shatter
teacup
after
teacup
against the walls
and scream
into your too-brown eyes
but I can't say or sing a thing,
cowering -
stilled.

I wish I had told you
when the stars had been too cold to breathe and
you and me
you and me
did not even bother
to inhale or other such trivialities;
our breaths had been stolen
in the time and space of a white
aeroplane,
I wish I had said
yes,
you are my disaster,
so what am I to you?

I have starry lights on my breath and
I don't know what to do
because I'm
choking.

Why did I start writing,
feeling
like this?
In an attempt to fill the spaces
in my narrative?
They gape open like
self-forced split wounds.
And yet are empty, so
empty
and bloodless.
Just numb.

Every **** self-help book
tells me it's my choice
how I feel.
I've been thinking and thinking and
I disagree.
It was never my decision to
paint my rib-cage blue,
to dull out and flatten, like a piece of
wood, my eyes into a lifeless faded varnish
that others mistake for spark or
mystery.
Or to stuff my head with
cotton wool that won't stop
pressing,
pressing.

I've just realized this is a not-good poem.
Forgive me, I'm
choking.

I have his mouth but
slurred and sharper; we do not
know how to converse

Since when did you fall back into the habit
of making homes out of people?

Stop being so silly.
It's dangerous.

You begin again with your inner monologue:
When will you ever learn?
You've slipped back into the glass comfort of
relocating your heart.
Back from the library into
a girl's blue hair, a boy's ricocheting argument,
so it beats in time,
in time
to the indie music pirouetting out of shared earphones.

But then of course,
you're alone in your bedroom, thinking, realizing.
Those flowers that you've planted
in the skin of one, the eyes of another,
the hands and conversations, notes and
t-shirts
will die one day.
Death frightens you, keeps you
wide-eyed fearful.
A black nothing where
you can't grow flowers.

In all this, in all this,
you've forgotten to sow seeds in your own veins
and take care of your own petals.
You're bloodless and so
your petals lie flat and pale,
dying.
It isn't pretty.
And maybe that's why those homes
where you've nurtured a garden,
planted roses, lilies, ******* sunflowers,
eventually crumble, vanish,
leave.
Before you know it, you're staring at somebody else's home,
somebody else's flowers.
And wishing they were yours.

Haven't I told you
not to make homes out of people?

We never liked the same music.

We never did
like the same music.
In a sea,
a virtual ocean,
of song recommendations, we
would only find one
or two
that we both
intensely
intensely
intensely
loved. And because of that,
those few, rare songs
became magical
in their significance.
Like small pearls in a tsunami
of grit.

What kind of music do you like now?

Shakespeare wrote
of ‘trees bedashed with rain’
Doesn’t that remind you
of tears upon a face?

Our lips hung amongst the stars.

Believe it or not, I feel aggressively happy.
Yes?
Yes.
Yes.

Yes.