Close your eyes.

         Imagine a white room.

There are objects in the white room.

Each object represents something in your life that worries or stresses you. Each object binds you to the external world. Each object stands for something that keeps your mind active, keeps you worrying, keeps you awake.

Imagine a white room.

I really am trying. My eyes are tight, eyelashes stuck to my cheek.

(I can feel the blood trickling through the veins in my sclera, ******* itself from end to end like cherryade through a drinking straw.)

I have my toes resting on my knees like a good little lotus, my fingers resting on top of them making the ‘ok’ sign.

This is a hard trick. It takes concentration. It takes effort to clear your thoughts from a metaphorical room (Jean’s room, tidy but never clean.)

What if I fall asleep upright? Will my neck break?

You ever see spiders playing dead? They roll onto their backs and cradle their bodies inside a disjointed prison that they’ve made with their own limbs. Their legs bend back at jaunty angles, crooked at the knees.

A spider ran at me once whilst I was sat on the toilet. I was reading an encyclopedia at the time, just flicking through, and in my panic I hit the spider with the spine of it. He curled up into a crumpled ball in the middle of the pink bathroom mat. I thought he was dead, but by the morning he had moved on, not leaving a trace.

In the grand cosmic metaphor of it all, we’re all just bristly little gymnasts looking to be left alone.

The white room is flying over the sea.

Objects that represent your daily life are sitting in the white room.

There is a door in the white room.

There are windows.

Using your imagination, remove each object from your room one by one. Throw them out of the door. Pour them out of the window.

Clear your mind.

Throw it all into the sea.*

My laptop is drowning. My journals are dissolving like sugar paper. White birds come from nowhere and lift up the corners of my bookcase, shaking it out into the ocean as one would air out a bed sheet. My memories are eating sand. The people I have loved are unsmiling shop-window cutouts, rolling along the waves of a mythical sea.

How far do I have to go? It seems like this means more than just Sleep. Every night do I need to be new, need to empty myself out like a clogged up sea-shell? How far do I have to go before it’s just me that’s left?

I can never make my sea deep enough because I don’t wish to drown. I’m not Ophelia.

I’m really not.

I don’t hold flowers neither.

I just can’t sleep.

(White isn’t a colour, it’s an absence.

Put a tick against my name. Use a bright red pen.

I’m right here. For always.)

June is the soft smile of your best friend as you regale them with your tall tales about how the weekend went, and their sweet giggle as you eat cheap lollies from a shady ice cream van.

June is a spinning ferris wheel at dusk, overlooking a royal blue bay scattered with olive green tents, and your little cab on the wheel that you get into over and over again.

June is the crisp notes that you spend on thin, wispy clothes in high-street stores, and the novelty sunglasses you try on in an opticians and end up buying because they're cool.

June is the flavours of a spice-infused curry, and a large spoonful of rice afterwards to soothe the burn. It is the tall cup of fizzy cherryade that tastes like it did when you were 7, but a bit different.

June is rainbow-spotting with your friends, and being yourself, and maybe for once not feeling so alone in a world that's usually so cold.

June is flying the flag of the weirdos, and jumping up and down to rock music, and flinging open your windows dramatically in time to the soundtrack of a musical. It is 80s music so loud that you can already see the noise complaint, but the complaint never comes.

June is a month of discovery and talking about nothing for hours on end. June is about hope, and a dawn for something different. June is about having a dream, and having the power to make it come true, because no matter who you are, you deserve for your dream to come true.

June is your time, but only if you let it be so. Will you stand? I will be beside you. I love you, and I'm glad you exist.

as a child, I drank
cherryade through strawberry
lace straws,

I remember the taste
of the first sugar
rush, innocent
and reckless

now, there is the morning
after, holding hands with
hangovers on commuter
trains

and in the bottom of glasses
and mirrors, truth shines

and although my drinks are
still red, the wine

reaches my heart, faster
and sits
in the place of
a lover

and the

crash

is no longer

cushioned

by something sweet

Dog saw the fault first.
Flurry of spots like acne
sprouting on a teenager’s face.

The ground, crushed pearls,
rubbery tones under foot,
bright white blotted by an exhibition

of crimson, as if seeping
through winter’s present of gauze.
Patches of darker red,

cherryade leftovers
of a sliced finger, a chest puncture,
nosebleed drizzle. No answers,

just a dash of human leak
to be buried by more
shavings of chalk from above.

No footprints but my own,
the dog’s own code
and there, one tree over,

a welt of lemon,
the culprit obvious, waving
baton of black leading me on.