Alabaster boy
Unlearn the things they have told you
Harsh lips and uncaring smiles
The ones who hated you
And the lips
That were supposed
To love

Alabaster boy
I want to untie the stitches
Of the scars on your left arm
Those crimson red slashed grins
Taunting you
Mocking you
I cannot heal them
But I can drown out their cries

Alabaster boy
You are so beautiful
Carved from marble
Soft as snow
Warm as laughter

Alabaster boy
Let me undo the damage
From years ago
Let me kiss every inch
Of your beautiful skin
Let me heal
With kind lips
And soft eyes-

Alabaster boy
I will treat you
With the reverence you deserve
Until you can look in the mirror
And see your beauty painted whole.

Steel yourself for the inevitable surprise
New ties knotting round your neck till you choke
Go for broken hearted again
Go for finished unstarted again
Fall in love for the feeling of falling from infinite heights
The rush of death grabbing at your clothes like a desperate lover trying to take you in.
The air wrapping round your limbs
For a moment you are
Suspended
Frozen in a fantasy:
A collage of red eyes and tendrils of smoke, the smell of fresh rain, resonating harmonies, the fretting curl of a tongue around a barbed remark, and now this-
**** shirts and shadows
This feels like remembering a dream when you fall out of sleep
Chasing through fog
Stumbling through memories of feeling like I wasn’t worth your time
That all I could aspire to was sunflower following you
Turning east to west
But feeling rooted to the spot
All tongue and talent lost
In the shadow of your apathy.
This feels less like fate
And more like I’m butterfly-catching
Sticking pins through anything beautiful
Trying to understand what makes it soar unaided for so long
And killing it in the process.
Other times, I am the butterfly,
Catching light until I’m trapped
My affection becomes a museum for you
To bring your children into, someday.
Because nothing can stop my descent
I am not iridescent to all of you
And maybe I know that
Maybe that’s why I choose you
The safety of a glass window to hide behind
And the familiar crunch and snap of bones As I hit the rocks beneath.

You're obsessed with being a unit because you never feel whole
Soul sullied by the deceit of past flames
Betrayed by the boredom and apathy of she with crimson hair
Why do you care if I’m alone right now?
Why do you care if I’m fraternising with newfound friends of the male gender
Bending me till I break down in tears and ask for forgiveness for sins I did not commit
And offences with heavier burdens than they are due
Forgive me Father, for I have skinned my knees on repeated apologies until my lips are chapped and raw
Until I began to see how my God couldn’t possibly love me
Until a smile was all it took to intoxicate me into another winner-takes-all verbal brawl
Until I learnt to scrawl the ten commandments into my skull
Thou shalt not choose your new friends, for you are too naive, consult me
Thou shalt not lie with anyone other than me, I’d rather you didn’t sleep
Thou shalt not talk to men other than to exchange pleasantries, I’d rather you didn’t breathe
Thou shalt not choose career opportunities that could take you away from me
Thou shalt not
Thou shalt not
Thou shalt not
I see you broken and bleeding on a cross and you whisper, “how could you do this to me?
I died for your sins
I died for your sins
I let the light in and I died for your sins.”
Enough!
I will make my own religion
One that breathes rose petals among the barbs
Armed with the knowledge of what worship should be
And you told me I must learn to pray on my knees,
But tell me:
If you took me to the altar,
How much life would I have to sacrifice
For this all-consuming, greedy god
Of love?

What makes a good poem?
Is it the rhythm? The structure? The carefully placed similes like dog treats and the restricted use of rhetorical questions?
Oh.
If that's the case,
I think I failed the test.
Oh please! Don't leave! Let me try this again!

(A cough to clear the throat)
Ha-HEM.

When one writes iambic pentameter
Doth that make his good prose the worthier then?

...No?

If I write a witty couplet in a rhyme
Does that make this utter **** more worth your time?

Have I got the tempo right?
I need an exclamatory tone!
Rhyming feels better somehow
But it doesn't make trombone.

My jittery jilted stream-of-consciousness different-line-length punctuation-less word-***** onto a page-
Pause for breath-
Can never match the likes of Donne or Keats;
But I've bled my soul and fire onto this page
And surely, that is worth more than conceits?

My god, you've finally done it.
I'm lost for words.
Me! Lost for words!

Words have always been my friends,
My tools,
Working for me when they would work for no one else.
I'd pluck perfect prose out of the air before me
Words curling luxuriously like cats around my writing hand
They seemed standoffish to others
But I was the Cat-whisperer of creative composition
My magic was language
I have personified pain
Allegorised anger
Sensationalised sadness
But when it comes to your love
I must use the words of another
For I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.

Why?
I want to give you the gift of my words,
For they are the only thing I have left to give,
My heart was always yours, even before we knew
How well we fit.

When talking on any other subject
I find it hard to stop
But when it comes to you,
My silver tongue turns to lead
Because you are the one thing I cannot articulate
How can I explain that when I look up to the sky I search for the colour of your eyes but I can never find it
That falling in love with you was like falling in love with a sunset
That the way you look at me feels as if, for the first time, I am a girl worth writing a story about.

People have put these sentiments into much better words than I ever could
And I love you always seemed enough before
But how can that crescendo of emotion I feel-
And the constant gentle waves that lap the seashores of my mind,
For what is love if only felt in passion not in anger-
Be summarised in three short words?

You know me.
I like to compartmentalise,
Categorise,
Have a name and a meaning for everything I do,
A consolation prize from society-
Sure you're weird, but others are too,
From my sexuality to my star sign
My life is neatly noted
With post its and labels
An explanation for everything
An Oxford dictionary definition for anyone who sticks around long enough to care
I like to pretend I don't do it
But I do.

You were the first person to make me realise:
There are some things
Beyond language.

Candy
Bubblegum girl, I think you deserve better.
You're dating a man who acts like a child,
Leaving a breadcrumb trail of missed calls until you're crying down the phone at work
Leaking candy floss tears into the carpet.
Far be it from me to impart my wisdom,
There's only a few months between us
But I've stopped pearlescent pear drops
Forming on my cheeks
Because no man is ever worth it, sugar.

Vegan
He told you drink no milk and eat no eggs
Till your blood thinned out and your body starved
Girl, you should know
A man who tries to purify your body
Is aiming to conquer holy ground
Raining redemption on the promised land
This is not the Crusades
And he has no right to a single centimetre of you
Your body is a temple of ***, drugs and rock n roll
It's a sin to cleanse it with kale.

Sky
You had a friend who painted you the colour of sunsets
Bleeding, beautiful, bright
Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?
Did it hurt when he shot you down?
Was your daddy a thief because I swear he stole stars to put in your eyes
And now that man wants them out
Stardust in his pocket
Leaving you dark and blind
How do you tame the sky?
By convincing you you're a wolf in sheeps clothing
Dressed himself up as the victim, the lamb to the lion
Ironed out the creases in his smile until he's a cloudless day
And you're the monster in the depths.

Scorpio
Five foot *******
In love with the sound of his own voice
With a flex of his pecs
He tells you he just doesn't think you 'werk'
You just don't seem to 'vibe' and with that jibe
Strips the maturity from the situation until it's exposed enough to be instagrammable.
You know what he's really like
Round family a sweetheart, an old fashioned charmer
Darling he's built himself a brand new armour
A carapace
And you may well get crabby sometimes
But he's the one with the sting.

Anxiety
He’s sweet
Really
A pure soul with no ulterior goals in mind
He likes you.
And guys too,
Which surprises you a little.
Maybe it’s his unassuming posture
The way he holds his head
And the five o’clock shadow that creeps through till it’s gone midnight
And he hasn’t messaged yet.
He likes you
Really
But doesn’t have control over his tongue
As it writhes inside the stranglehold the brain has put it under.
He came to these studios to find a voice
And found yours, lilting, Celtic with a northern twang
Like the snapped string of a guitar.
You talk to him about...everything
And he tries to muster the words to keep up with your shine
Finds solace in your bed but not your lips.
He ends it over text
With bitten nails stabbing the keys
To lock your heart anew.

New Rules
Something about the hesitation in your smile says
That you are used to living on a knife edge
A bridge edge
A cliff edge
Anywhere he could push-pull you off
Throw himself into churning depths so you'll come back to catch him
But you're the ******, naturally
Throw around the C-U-N
Tea-sipping, words slipping from your mouth as we realise
A shared history, of a sort.
We've both felt the iron tang of blood
As we bit our tongues against injustices railed against us
Words and names buried so deep
They cannot be plucked out like the splintered praise of friends.
You say You'd take him back in a heartbeat,
But all you're missing is an echo chamber
A sounding board for your own atrioventricular system
Hidden behind your lungs
Is all the love that you could give.
Share it with the world.
Share it with yourself.
And don't pick up the phone.

Take me back
Where all is muffled
Blanketed
Lights filtered through meshed pink
Sanctuary
Harsh sounds of existence slurred
Safe from harm

Ophelia, drowning in flowers
Escape a world I don't understand
Mottle my fingers I cannot see
Where I begin and the air ends

I wish to be this close to you again
Connected by a cord
That can never really be cut
Feed knowledge and experience
Into a pre-natal brain
Etch your wisdom into whorls
Thicken the pads on my fingers
Envelop me
The beginning and the end of my universe
My Dôn
Is it any wonder I cried when I left?

Take me back to a time before language
The only foetal words I know
Are the drum bass of my universe
I am, I am, I am,
And soon I will echo your confident staccato
I am, I am, I am
Okay.

Faulty factory toys are fun to use, at first
Blue eyed girl with the white blonde curls
From dads side of the family
They coo at her
Before she learns to walk
And talk
And talk
And talk
When they built her in the baby factory
They must've forgot the little red button
The one that says
"Shut up for one single solitary ******* second and let someone else speak"
She doesn't pause to allow the other person the liberty to flit words through the air like songbirds
Instead hers land like pheasants
Shot in the skull
Trickling out opinions that were never asked for
With the brain fluid.

She's got a lot of them too
Opinions
And they're all right
She knows everything there is to know
At seventeen as well
What a prodigy, she thinks
What a nuisance, say the wise men
What a delusional idiot
What
A
Bore into her skull and all you'll see
Behind the kind eyes and philosophy
Is a witch
Entranced by the enchantment
Of her own voice
A selfish *******
Who buys her birthday presents at the last minute.

At least the parents got to have a test drive
A prototype
So they knew what to do right this time
Factor out whatever it was
The ingredients with the sell by date
That made this thing so near to right
But odd enough to be 'not quite'.
This time make one that's not lazy
That's not selfish
That doesn't want to be a ******* artist
That lets others speak
That can contribute and participate
Not sit on the sidelines
Heading for burnout
Heading for disaster-

Uncheck the box this time that says
Sordid mind
That says
Can't reply to texts
Even when friends are on the edge
of suicide, For ***** sake.
Tick the box that unveils the beauty of humanity
Fix it's eyes
Teach her to see these sacks of meat
The way others do
The way you're supposed to
Instead of like puzzles or pictures or packaging for a soul
Create a person not afraid
Of making mistakes
that can make her own decisions
This time make a mind
That can jump through the hoops
Society left behind
Fix her this time
Don't make another freak
On the fringes
Never quite fitting in

And the funny thing is
Even after this ******* perfect kid
Comes along and shows that blue eyed blonde-haired girl
Just how to do it
She's an old *****
No use teaching her new tricks
She'll shut out little miss pretty perfect project two point oh
She can't seem to help it
She thinks the best company in the world is her head
Her head?! Have you seen it
It's barbed wire and sunshine
It’s a rose choked by thorns
Do not touch her-
She will make you bleed.

"I'd like to be a fly on the wall," you say.
Would you?
Would you really like to be privy to all
that drama and intrigue, without ever being noticed?
Sounds nice, I suppose.
But I'll let you in on a little secret-
That, my dears, is false advertising.
Truth is, people always notice flies
They just choose to ignore them
And lower their voices when you buzz by on sugar-spun wings of self-confidence-
Maybe it's just all in your head
Maybe you've misinterpreted things-behind kaleidoscope eyes
It always looks like there are more of them than you.

So you gain confidence
You hover on the fringes of their circle
And drone out a low hum of 'what've you been up to today?'
Or 'how're you?'
Or 'long day, huh?'
The response is offhand
A verbal flick of the wrist
Batting the ball back into your conversational court
Because coming at you with a fly swatter
Or a rolled up Cosmo magazine
Takes more effort than they're willing to give.

You buzz about some more
Hoping maybe the silence will entice them to engage
But no,
They can't hear your buzzing
Or they won't.
So instead you stand
Fly on the wall
Content with watching the light catch your wings
Repeatedly wringing your hands near your face
In a way they probably think is malevolent
I promise I'm not plotting-
I'm just juggling the weight of my loneliness
Maybe if I shift it from one palm to another
Somehow I will lighten the load.

Take comfort in this, little fly-
The sun makes your wings iridescent
And even though they'll never get close enough to see that, you can.
It's not a trick of the light
Your fractal eyes do not deceive you-
They are duplicate.

I wonder how they do it
Those immaculate girls
With butterscotch hair and honeyed smiles
So sleek and streamlined,
So very contained
Gliding through life without a care,
They are the definition of grace.

My life is more haphazard
My room a bomb site of to do lists
My hair wild and frazzled
My shirt untucked
And my eyes bright-
Not good bright, though,
Not sweet sunlight bright,
Feverish, they dart with static-
My hands pirouette through the air
My teeth slightly crooked but smiling broadly
Dark circles under my eyes
And a liberal spray of spots on my face
Because who has time for face paint
When the mornings are reserved for catching up on the sleep you lost
Exploring the universe in your mind?

My words from my poems to my texts
Are long unending sentences
And stop-starts
Littered with exclamations!!
And I swear I'm articulate
This explosion you're hearing is vomited onto a page
A direct translation for a brain that flits and stumbles over itself
I beg of you to like me

My laughter bursts into your personal space
And I do too
I always get too close-
I come on too strong, apparently
I love too much, too hard and too fast
I fall far too easily and break my own heart
And drive people away
Because I'm not aloof or cool or distant
There's no thrill of the chase with me
Just honesty
And an eagerness to please.

I lurch between seeing these
As my most wonderful assets
And my greatest downfalls.
But *******
If you are one of the people who has made me believe the latter
Sure, I can be intense
Sure, I can be hard to love
But you have never known loyalty like mine.
Never will you find such passion and intensity
And that's a ******* good thing, you hear me?
That's a good thing.
I am vibrant and alive
Where you see cloudy days
I can find a kaleidoscope of colour
My energy comes not from coffee
But from this white-hot centre of my heart
This supernova colour-clashing burnout explosion of me.

And it's a ******* honour
To stand in my presence
And feel my warmth.

I have a hole
Inside my chest
I try to fill it up.
With voice
With words
With love
With dodie tickets.

Nothing sticks.

Like glitter in the wound,
I bleed out.

I am surviving only
Through midnight dishwashing
Submerging my amygdala in soapy water
Trying to scrub it clean
Listening to los campesinos! so I don’t have to hear the water rush
Or taste the bubbles on my tongue-
My life only makes sense with a soundtrack.
But in all my favourite albums
There’s a skip on the record
I must have dropped a stitch somewhere in the fabric of my self-determination
In the dam that would have stopped this flood of bitter glitter tears
Maybe there’s something missing in the lining of my soul
Because I’m happy.
I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.
And yet there’s still the catch in my throat
The lingering sense of not seeming like myself
I’m shadowboxing my demons that are smaller than the mountains I’ve conquered
And yet
How do you **** a thing unseen?
A thing that creeps on the edges of my vision
In every blind spot
I don’t know what I’m fighting so I don’t know how to fix it.

I am surviving only
Through midnight dishwashing
And one way phone-call wishes to a god of self delusion
And doubt
Self-sabotaging from the inside out
Relying on chip shop philosophy to get from one minute to the next
And yet I don’t remember what you told me.

It occurs to me
That maybe my demons are dead
And perhaps I am fighting
Myself.
The parts that don’t live up to the lies I tell to sell my soul to every passing stranger.

You see, I know
That there’s nothing to cry about;
Or that there’s everything to cry about
But it’s not the stuff I’d write poems about
War and famine and plague oh disease
This festering something that’s inside of me.

Cut out a pound of rotting flesh to pay my debt to art
Cut out every dead piece of me, cut out my failing heart.

We sit in your car
With the sun shining through
And take a moment
To just
Breathe.

Through the peach-fuzz pink
Of the interior of my eyelids
I can feel you watching me,
Your gaze as warm and lingering
As the rays of sunlight softly caressing my skin,
I imagine you tracing a pattern in your mind,
Following the gentle flutterings of my eyelids
Exploring the soft shape of my face
Watching the gentle susurration of my breath pooling from just-parted lips
Tracking the ridges of my collarbones
On marble white skin.
I can feel you watching me
And it makes me so overjoyed
Because I missed this
This thing that is not quite yet but a little akin
to love.

A moment of self doubt
Flickers in my field of vision-
What if I am wrong?
What if you do not feel this way
And I am stuck
In this idyllic peach-pink cherry-blossom fantasy of my own creation?
So I unshut my eyelids
Unstop time
And through the bluish haze
Of the suns rays
I find
Your eyes
On mine.

At night,
When nothing could save me from my head,
I opened my eyes to see the night sky
Eery green glow on world weary white
Why do they always have pentagram points
Enlarged or minuscule, like prism cutouts
Windows to the world above?

If you concentrate,
You can plot the lines between them
Like the Greeks and Romans did,
Fathers and children of all mankind.
This bedroom was a blank canvas for a child's hands
To find and mark different constellations
Her own legends
Her own mythos
Monsters and fairies, princes and kings.

When she looks up at the ceiling,
She can see our myths
Etched in the spaces between the pools of light
Intangible to most, perhaps,
Felt across a breach
The dark span of country roads and motorways
Train tracks tracing patterns on skin
And sometimes on the darkest nights
I can see nothing but stars
And can't make out the shape of your face
This isn't a simple science.

Love,
Sometimes my light does not seem to bridge the gap
Sometimes yours seems faint, too,
But we both burn holes in the cracked plaster
Some days, this is the easiest thing in the world
On others, we might as well be light years apart.

That little girl still looks though
Spread eagled on a ballerina duvet, she still smiles
Watching the lights shift
Playing dot-to-dot with fate
Until she gently falls asleep
Dreaming of castles she has yet to see
And princes she has yet to meet.

A ******* the train with witch's hair and dark eyes
Stared at me as if I was hiding a secret in the curve of my lip
Or the space between my eyebrows
Or in whirlpool-pupils
I wonder if there is something of the occult in the way I walk
Like a dead woman who adores the crows that pick at her bone marrow
Is there something in the hollows of my eyes that suggests
I am not afraid of the demons summoned to hunt me down
On my morning commute?

The comforting warmth of a crowd
Never fails to amaze
Food and friends and *****
What more could a girl ask for

"Sexuality!" Somebody cries
And we groan
But we talk and talk anyway
We explore ourselves
Touch-starved children
Rejected by brothers and lovers
The pretty and the beloved of the world
So we reach out to each other
Curl into each other's affection
For we have so much love to give
And this-
this is the only place where we know
We can give it freely
For others will take
Take
Take
Until we are bled dry.

I hear of teenage parties
As if they are mythology
Of people hooking up
And falling out
Puking guts and gossip
Like there's no tomorrow

I'd much rather this
Using streetlamps to guide our hearts
Staring up at the stars and asking
What all of this means
Who all of us are
And what would happen if we were gone

Soon we will scatter
Like leaves in the autumn
We travel far and wide
But though we may be apart
We will never forget
The tree to which our roots belong.

I have a hole
Inside my chest
I slowly fill it up.
With laughter
With inside jokes
With love
With positivity posts.

Something heals.

Like puzzle pieces slotting,
I am home.

You said you wanted these eyes in your sights for the rest of your life
You want the heart and soul of me but you deny the whole of me
You forgot about my wings
Those hulking, iridescent things
They sit on my shoulder blades and long for the skies
Even I migrate to warmer climes where I might find my piece of mind.
Out of the two of us, I find it is I who follows the teachings of Christ
Of love for all, and forgiveness too
But I also follow ipheginia, boudicca, Joan of ark and any other woman who had her spark quenched by a man
I know you did not mean to rein me in
Your fear was your scalpel, and you clipped my wings
I know now why the caged bird sings
And I know why the house bird hisses when you bring him food
He longs for the open skies
Doesn't care what lies beyond the curtain
And if in the end he dies, at least it'll be on his own terms.
You didn't inflict a cage on me
I tore those wings from seam to seam
Thinking that wanting you should be enough for me
That wanting anything more was heresy
You made me think a part of me was broken.
That it was selfish to fly south for winter,
Even if I'd die in the cold.
You always used to shout at the birds when they sang too loud,
And I wonder how I didn't know before.
You said you wanted these eyes in your sights for the rest of your life
But if we did that
We'd never be apart.