"flatmate" poems
at the desk, applying for jobs
there is coffee in my cup
and paint in the creases of my fingernails,
on the wall, a whiteboard with new song lyrics
and a list
of things I need to buy,
of course, once I have the money to buy them,
which brings me back to the desk
which an empty bottle of Cabernet Merlot
sits with an empty glass
and notebooks and a mason jar
with cloudy brown-red water
from the bristles of my paintbrushes
my coffee is cold
the french press is in the kitchen
but my flatmate is filming in there
so I’m stuck at my desk
with two sips of cold coffee left,
applying for jobs.
I feel very fragile
right now,
partly because I didn’t go to a job interview
today,
partly because I didn’t go to a job trial,
on friday
though I don’t want to be a waitress
and **** modelling for art classes scares me.
there’s a plant on my windowsill
named Lucy
and she doesn’t have to do anything
and there are two vanilla candles and an incense holder
with lavender incense burning
but **** all the things that
"bring peace"
like small plants, candles, incense, crystals and photographs;
I want a healthy and clean life,
so I have these things
part as a protection
from my own mind
but to be perfectly honest,
I’m at the desk, browsing jobs online,
saving them for later into a bookmark folder entitled
"Wellington Jobs"
instead of actually applying.
Nov 24, 2013
Nov 24, 2013 at 10:08 PM UTC
Honest
He who doesn't work, works **** or just can't commit
He homeless
He an affair and a **** good fix
****** with a tendency to show underwhelming ****
Twisted into nicety by such anger at the human, the wants
Good at *** when in love
Un-abused
Un-poisened
One of my best mates like
Dyslexic thick ****
A problem
Step child and real life son, grandson always, always, grandson
eldest unappreciated, underestimated, paranioder? Paranoidist.
One of the needers of therapists
Panicked by past
Fractured by future
A depressive, doesn't drink, do drudgery like drugs
A fearfull mess mummy's boy
Fatherless
Fathered less
A letdownshowoff
overconfident,
Anxious, ex husband, probable poofter, please Goddot, please, let he be a cheater
A ex punk, definite ***** pushover, almost poet
So easily hurt, yet never hurts
My love one. (Cary you Guardian)
Too damed romantic
Cant read but by gosh buys books
Genius
artistic, Autistic, an idiot and just another bad student
manish
Little Boy
child
Unable to be alone and not a good flatmate
Justifier of the almighty grey areas,
The cheated...
the Strong willed.
Apr 16, 2016
Apr 16, 2016 at 7:06 PM UTC
as the rain slides down
the window pane
and the moondrifts from
cloud to cloud
i remember my first
flatmate...
Jerome,
who tooks his smalls
home to be washed by
his mother,
who was fastidious about
trimming his ginger...brown
beard, but not so fastidious
in cleaning the sink...
the owner of Muffin, the budgeriagar who survived
being vaccumed up once,
but not twice....
Jerome, full of gay angst
and closeted pride...
who taught me...
love is not an animal
that can be leashed
but is a thing,
of wild untamed beauty...
Jerome....who gave love
in buckets and bunches
of floppy daffodils...
i lost him as a friend, many
years past......but some nights drear and dark
he pops by....to say cheerio
Dec 16, 2014
Dec 16, 2014 at 5:40 AM UTC
Don't fall for your flatmate it'll never work.
Just click your fingers and say come 'ere.
Not like that, say it with charm be gentle but masterful.
You sound ****** when you say it.
Down deep in the lake fish glimmer like stars.
And old embers are heaped on the horizon like a city.
Jan 17, 2013
Jan 17, 2013 at 8:39 AM UTC
There’s one thing you must learn
About women, it is just this
They always call you –
Whether it be to make-up
Or break-up
They let you know where you stand.
It was some time after I fell out with Josy
And I dared to ask her flatmate
The droll question:
“Josy holding up ok?”
She clearly wasn’t because
She hadn’t called me.
The short answer I got
Was a cold
“Yeah, she’s fine”
Women too are full of contradictions:
“Fine” means she’s not fine
She’s probably been crying,
The short answer is teasing
They want you to ask more
To suffer, suffer, suffer.
The fact the flatmate was reserved
Means that Josy has told her a lot.
The fact I thought this was gonna be painless
Is testament to the fact it’s not.
Nov 11, 2011
Nov 11, 2011 at 2:55 PM UTC
Being happy isn't having enough money to go out tonight
it isn't slurring your words
or being surrounded by birds
in a bar or on a hillside.
Being happy isn't having your political party in power
or having *** in the shower
or drinking your favourite tea
or getting down on one knee and hearing a shriek of joy.
it's understanding the word "no"
and carrying your grandma's wishes with you wherever you go.
Being happy isn't a fluffy, roasted sweet potato
or a sesame bagel with smashed avocado
it's stooping down low
and saying hello to what grows
at the bottom of the social food chain
and talking and taking away a bit of someone else's pain
it's swapping smiles with a new stranger every day
walking miles through danger not to have your say
but to hear someone else's.
Being happy is always giving a couple of quid to the homeless,
whether you have it or not.
it's keeping smiling when there's a twist in your plot
Being happy, it's, it's cleaning your flatmate's dishes as well as your own
it's having a clear state of mind - where you feel at home.
Jun 6, 2018
Jun 6, 2018 at 7:22 PM UTC
A thin egg coats
fast breaking
Morning
Mushrooms read
as crowded flatmate's
Onion
Beads of brine
sweet from Sopressatta
Mine
And a Cheesy foam
crest upon our Coffee
Sea
Nov 19, 2016
Nov 19, 2016 at 11:52 AM UTC
i don’t think i’ve ever been
more in love with a city
than i was with you.
it’s inexplicable.
the more i see
this spirit of community,
of togetherness
where i live now,
the more i miss my real home.
it might be another country,
but you took me in,
held me like your own.
one hundred
and sixty thousand people,
yet it was always one:
the date whose flatmate
played in my favourite band,
the pub where a singer walked in
and we had to act cool,
even with fifty strangers, once,
crammed into a living room.
you were secret codes
and piano bars,
ropes above the thames,
carnivals and day festivals.
meeting someone,
and keeping them forever.
it was never just work.
it was passageways, and talent
rising like ivy through stone,
having the world
at my fingertips
as though sitting on a throne
without having a clue.
but i still did
what i thought i should,
and found myself alive
in the whole of you.
Aug 31, 2025
Aug 31, 2025 at 6:43 PM UTC
text me back to tell me that you're in
that you're in the living room,
downing gin,
sat next to an overflowing bin
whilst your flatmate plays the smallest violin
because if you're out I know you're meeting him -
(swollen from his evenings at the gym)
and I'll turn up, to tear him limb from limb,
so please text back, to tell me that you're in
Jul 2, 2014
Jul 2, 2014 at 5:39 PM UTC
I am cascading through myself,
and no one can save me.
We’re outside some gig.
A light rain.
An almost mist.
My knees are cold, and there are too many people,
and I have never felt more alone.
You’re waiting for me to reciprocate.
Everything is white noise.
I’m caught in the eddy of your words,
watching waves flicker into being,
before dashing on the cobbles beside my feet.
All of my existence has been an ephemeral becoming.
I’m in a car.
My flatmate screams at his window for a single second before apologising.
I’m climbing out the side of my apartment,
because I’ve locked myself out of my room,
and I no longer fear death.
The other day I thought I heard you singing.
I watch cars pass.
They bleed into the city.
A breath without beginning or end.
Reality loses definition,
or perhaps I do.
My knees are cold.
Feb 2, 2016
Feb 2, 2016 at 12:21 PM UTC
I stretched
and my head shook
and a fragment of dust fell on my screen
and I felt dead silence
I had thought it before-
if there was anything happening in the silence
if people who sat there
were instead mounted
in some egotistical endeavor
in the distance and out the window
I began to see the beginning
of a stationary UFO
and the idle suspension chords
of the stadium below
and the light above
and down they glowed.
I saw buildings
that came in phases
instead of the pages
I am meant to read
my flatmate nagging me
et ce n'est pas possible
with such a scope of the city
and the day turned to a pale blue gray
and the sun waded away
down the back of this library
in which I could not read
Mar 5, 2014
Mar 5, 2014 at 12:47 PM UTC
Three tabs of acid and a year of postmodern novels will **** you up in a shorter span of time than doing a degree in poststructuralism, and only an idiot with a death wish would do both. Manic romp to reach nowhere in a political field that never arrives, except in France.
Well Sartre once said nothing, and so did Derrida, and so did Baudrillard. Endless procession of words for the sake of filling a vacuum that didn’t exist until it was filled. Enter Freud; exit Bernays. All meaning atop a Golden Bough.
Sitting in your flatmate’s room the acid kicks in and suddenly no one is themselves, every line that leaves their mouths traceable to a media product, the perfect communion of pluralism arriving as the terror of integral capitalist banality. To speak is to add to the mockery; to say nothing is to let the mockery continue.
Forget it all by watching Youtube videos at 0.25x speed. Displace the terror of your own situation through the consumptive behaviour that had constituted it in the first place. Watch in gleeful delight as the eyes of whatever presenter happens to be on the screen at the moment dart between this or that object of desire, ever unsure of where to settle amongst an infinite number of existential refrains, none of which deliver from the anxiety of the prior.
Holding a caramel slice in the departmental tea room, your lecturer waits for you to respond, but all you manage is a cough.
Oct 17, 2018
Oct 17, 2018 at 5:56 AM UTC
I used to think I would be alone forever
I used to believe it would be all right
It took me a year to realize
Nothing is that easy
And though loneliness is easier to deal with than other people
Nothing is more gratifying than a group of friends
A run with your peers
A long discussion with your flatmate
Nothing beats company
Nothing at all
Sep 22, 2014
Sep 22, 2014 at 7:03 PM UTC