r i p pluto (BR + oli))
this was our bby for like, 84 days, and now we are cutting the umbilical cord (probably with no gloves on cos that’s how we fight) 5am in the bath is our suggested reading position ly :-)
i know I love you cos when i read my star sign i read yours2. and i mde my pin number the same as yours. i would let you rob me. but besides, security questions are 2 obvious to a lover or a friend and i have been dreaming about the difference of those perspectives. i am early morning sloth- looking up homeopathic remedies to loneliness whilst listening to russian pop music. feelings are all the same no matter your longitude.
art is like being made to look directly at the sun yr retinas burning out clasping onto sockets. the last eclipse it was too cloudy 2 possibly go blind. i want to burn each poem i write but “manuscripts don’t burn”. the end of the world is already over/ this poem is every minute of the rest of your life/ remember when we were all gonna die on the 6th of june 2006 the apocalypse will be forgettable. not like your freckles. not like how my gut is always twisted like those straws i tried to swallow last new years. you can’t be eaten up by your own unspoken loneliness if you pray. well hashtag yolo.late with a coffee is my new aesthetic and i can’t see you frown cos i wear sunglasses inside now and my manuscript can’t be burnt.
i am measuring time in places where my body feels new. i am trying my best to equate happiness with routine. as a child i would stumble on purpose when i was learning to walk so someone would pick me up // when i stopped eating meat my mother would sneak in tiny pieces of it into every meal in the belief that it was something i needed // i think of this as you sleep next to me on the night bus home and that blue skies are just a daytime mask for the suffocating expanse that lies behind it // i want you to run. seventy-one thousand years ago the number of humans suddenly dropped to only fifteen thousand in the whole world after a disaster and it’s closest we’ve come to running out of responsibilities. and we’re still here, and you’re here, and and we all stumble out of ourselves at night and test the echoes of stale murmurs and we live in a universe on a planet where 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, but that doesn’t matter because you have me and i have you and we can all think and reason and so much more than that and isn’t that great, that i know you think and feel, and that this mean lots to me, its cool and there is no inherent meaning as to why i travelled three hours to be on a beach to think about whether i have a finite number of thoughts that will simply overlap into each other until they settle and dry out and merge into one
or whether the earth’s rotation will ever come to a halt because it forgot why it was doing it in the first place and the sun will be stuck halfway set and you will look at the sun and feel sorry that its most beautiful moment will fade into a mundane sight that will eventually kill us all
and i love you and i want to wake up and kiss your sober cheek and. i wonder what your eyelashes feel like. butterflies. i think.
you exist outside of yourself. remember, every day.
i am running across a freshly mowed lawn barefoot in the summer digging in my heels to find leftover dew with the tangible belief that i will not step on anything that will hurt me.
the hurt is just a thing that is there. instead of a thing that i am feeling - i am letting it stay
i stole paint and poured it on the grass outside my house and no-one told me trying to love myself would poison my fingertips i blame my skin for what it breathes in i take out the folded up napkins holding up my toy chairs my father keeps all of his in the bedside drawer (each drive) (past by the beach) (on sunny days) my mother always told me that’s where those cockle pickers drowned in the summer have you ever tried to take blood out of sand hundreds of collapsing cliffs falling into the ocean i dreamt that ants crept out of under my fingernails and your heart was a giant iceberg freezing and expanding i threw up into every airport bathroom and fell out every arm i lived in
in the news:
//you know how you feel when you lean back in a chair. and there’s a perfect point in between falling down and staying up . or when you’re walking along the very edge of the pavement. and you trying to balance but you slip off. when you take a photo in public. but you back out at the last second. so it comes out really blurry or it’s just a photo of your feet. and you sip your coffee too early. and it scolds off your anxiety about being too close for those three seconds when you felt her breathing a type of breathing that carried a feeling. or you know when you accidentally record over that day with her on your camera or ruin the negatives and its too late to do it again. you bought tickets to the cinema but someone’s in your seat. so you leave and spend the night looking up the film’s plot for when your friend asks about it later. when you pulled faces in the photobooth. and you thought i hope she remembers i was actually smiling. i was just pretending to frown//
a favourite feeling : the perfection of that uncertainty, the beautiful , stay in that moment of
pending romance, wishing your number in the line never comes up, timid intentions, tiptoeing over definitions, but once you realize it, once you stop to take a look, once you ask the moment to stay, it is over.
a playlist for when you are under a capsized canoe with only a tiny pocket of air: crackling recordings of e.e. cummings in a library nicolas cage singing love me tender (at the end of david lynch’s wild at heart) the big bang sequence in terrence malick’s tree of life a 3am hillside hum from cars that cannot be seen but are believed in when you both say (i’m sorry) at the same time car wash sounds cradling the windows from inside the car (preferably the backseat) lava tumbling down mountains hugging the earth swallowing life in deep breaths
I AM HURTLING THROUGH SPACE AT 4:24AM. THERE IS NO SOUND. NOT EVEN FOR THOUGHTS TO SPEAK. NOT EVEN FOR BLOOD TO RUSH THROUGH MY ARMS . I AM BEING CRADLED BY ZERO GRAVITY AD INFINITUM AROUND OUR MOON AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL. I AM STRETCHING INTO THE DARKNESS AND SWIMMING TO SHADOWS THAT RESEMBLE YOU. I CAN HOLD EACH MOMENT IN MY HANDS FOR AS LONG AS I WANT AND SLOW DOWN EVERY HOPE I HAVE. I AM TRYING TO TWEET YOU A MESSAGE ABOUT HOW THIS IS WHAT LOVE FEELS LIKE BUT THERE IS NO SIGNAL HERE IN SPACE. xxx
you will never know how many trees you have killed how many insects you have swallowed how many survived
the true number of nights that blurred into days for you the motions and gestures that led on a trail to you breathing on your bed in a life where you google ‘can people smell depression on you’ there are tiny fingers pushing on my throat and i am drowning my own hands in quicksand
on loving you : (the loss of meaning through repetition) do i do i do i do i do i// i do i do i do i do //do i do i do i do i do i// i do i do i do i do i do i do i do i do// do i do i do i do i do i // i do i do i do i do// do i do i do i do i do i
DRINKING TOO MUCH COFFEE WITH YOU IS MY NEW FAVOURITE FOR REAL LEGITIMATE ADULT HOBBY.
uncertainty daintily thrusts panoramic life views in shorthand and I think the sway and ebb might have eroded against each other when you scraped my arm- reaching for something you were sure of like the non-existent step at the end of the case. but the view is better here with your body crumpled up inside yourself- a collapsing telescope- hidden under ribsyr dreams and some mothballs that never quite landed now torn apart and escaping as you watch horizontally your old life disappear on a sea’s edge you only just figured out existed. im leaving here and i never did stop running into walls or opening and shutting windows compulsively trying to find my friends that always break my heart- and it’s viable that your magnetism has offset my compass. i will eat everything that has ever made you cry. i would steal low grade pharmaceuticals for you and we could live in a tent for a year. i will win the lottery for us and buy us two cats, a plant even we couldn’t kill and a fridge full of chocolate soy milk. i believe i believe i believe i believe i believe i
yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yoloyolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yoloyolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo.
SUCKING ON A GLACIER MINT REMINDS ME OF LATE NIGHT SLEEPOVERS YOU ALWAYS BRUSHED YR TEETH FIRST (I FORGET TO FLOSS) KISSING YOU IS JUST LIKE EATING PEACHES STICKY BEEHUNTING FINGERS ROUND MY NECK, SLOPPY THUMBS HONESTY IN SPIT WE ARE BLOOD CLOTS 2GETHER TWICE AS THICK AS THIEVES i feel gratitude for wht higher power let me put my skin in the cracks of yours / i will make sure they don’t get you if you are the last one in a line of a group of teenagers exploring a sudden noise in a forest late at night during a camping trip / i will make sure they don’t get you even if they are the FBI and i will make sure they take me instead if it is some weird hostage situation and i will never hold it against you. i would have whatever you wanted tattoed on my collarbones if i thght it wouldnt cheapen itself. if i knew it wouldn’t wash off in the rain ink rolling down my body staining like chem trails. if i knew my body was beautiful enough for your words. if you let me i’ll be your angel. your torso translucent (allow my light to bathe u).
we met at the surprise birthday party for the friend we didn’t know at the house we had to ask strangers to find. two blocks down. you won’t miss it. we hid with everyone else and we were the only ones that left our arms in view from the side of the curtain, our legs hanging out from under the bed, we didn’t know who to wish happy birthday to, so we stayed behind the curtains, we stayed gathering dust on the windowsill. after the party ended and everyone grew up and moved on and changed their names and walls and subscribed to different magazines n broke up over horoscopes, and you said we should go out and dance with our bags on our shoulders and heads bowing down eyes closed swaying against towel racks and gift wrapping and scraped knees. you kissed me first but i kissed you first and we both fell and yo u told me not to kiss u anymore because u were ill and you said my lips were bruise coloured i said it was the wine, you said each blink saw me recede in // but that you were always a fan of chasing tides and wading-but-then-running through water waist deep just to remind yr body of that david foster wallace commencement speech until yr legs got used to the extra weight// and i said it was the wine. we wished the wrong person happy birthday and took the rest of the bottles and raided the medicine cabinet and we camped out in their hallway backs against the radiators, under pillows that formed out of hands and measured breaths and i thought your insides were made of marshmallows and sun-soaked sand and you said in a way that didn’t move your lips ‘i lied, you know, i’m not a pisces’ and i nodded and i buried my secrets in your teeth that night i swear i marked each one with an x and you said in the future there’ll be a way to download your consciousness onto a harddrive and you can skip the time spent spitting out bits and pieces and fragments of what’s half inside, and you said ‘then people will see’ and laughed n you kissed my double-dose-skin with yr triple-dose-tongue on a rooftop over the skyline and you told me to think about swaying silk curtains, to really think about it close my eyes and think think think think think. swaying. silk. curtains. in a gentle wind. think think think think.
i am ​ reminiscing about the time before i became a zygote, before i was a thing whole coherent singular, before i was doomed to be me and there was no escape,
before my skeleton formed and expectations began to set then grow then crack, before i broke my arm balancing on the fence and tyre tracks left a divot in my hands that felt uncomfortable for anyone to hold my grandmother would always finish her bedtime stories telling me that the human body is a cage, that scientists stapled on my skin when i was born, that the blood in our body is a tiny ocean we are lost in, that it does not matter if i get my palms dirty in the mud or if i stare too long at the sun, that this was a lie to prevent us from seeing who we were. i am going to leave time capsules across every city i live in to be opened after i die to let strangers know all of the lies i have told
i will wait for you in the car and when you come back your voice will sound like rain tainted gravel and you will say they want you back in and i will make an embarrassing joke and we will wake up one morning and the moon is suddenly moving towards us but scientists can’t figure out why and our accelerated mortality gives me back my appetite and reminds us that just like sunlight recedes from our skin after summer so will the miles of thoughts about who will take care of our imaginary future children, our imaginary future children are already dead, and i decide to make a dream, the size of a school-locker that i used to be able to fit inside and i will make you the sun and i will revolve around you and you will tell me, please don’t look at me, i am daughter of two collapsing stars, and you will point to the ones you love galaxies away and you will say they are already dead but light travels so slow that i get to watch them make the mistakes that they’ve already made and waste time they’ve already used up and they are burning up the night sky with fuel that’s doomed to run out and i cannot do a thing but watch and that is beautiful, i said, and how i wish the ghost of everyone i loved would melt into the dark of the night sky and into each other and that i thought this was true. and i will look at you and know it will hurt.
It started with cracked skin on a torso. The torso felt pinpricks when questioned and was attached to a suitable-looking head which had opinions sometimes. Sometimes it starts with a smoother model but this was reality and this torso’s owner didn’t believe in the extra five minutes they might feel inclined to use slathering moisturiser over their damp cracked skin in an attempt to create a less shocking landscape to take to the pool. So it remained and became ingrained as a personal effect. Then there was the velvet. The velvet bought coffee and sometimes that coffee was spilt in library books that were then not returned out of anxiety for the consequences. The velvet spread into the cracks like grout in a bath, rubbing callously. The cracks talked to nobody, grew despondent and then, like anything real, died. It wasn’t the cracks-in-the-skin’s fault that they were unwanted. They knew their place. And shrunk a little bit at first then a whole lot until soon the velvet had swarmed over the torso like cling film. But the cracks were still there. Infinitesimal now, but still alive. And they would screech and scream and wait for something to happen. Some days something did. The velvet would cut and stab and stick fingers deep into a throat to only make bile surface. Razors could cut down through the sternum line, crystallizing an image of muscle sinews in a mind’s eye. Some days nothing happened. Most days were lost to sleep or whole hearted kind gestures, if something could maybe be enough to rectify what lived underneath the skin. This continued on loop, systematically for months. The drugs dissolved morning and evening into a bloodstream. Hunger was distant and willpower had to be resolved again and again to move forward. To stick with a current. It was forgotten that once you taught something how to feel it could not be retracted. That what was tangible couldn’t become dull once more. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The burning of the body doesn’t necessary need much firewood. I ostracised the Vikings; personally burning away from the boats heading towards Valhalla. My own burning was cataclysmic. the worst place you could ever trap a human is their own head. it feels like something is stabbing at my heart fictitiously.
everything Is real and can be real if you let it happen. do not be disillusioned by my feelings of impending doom they are present and correct. instinctively trust all gut instincts that defeat logic. do not run. trust yr self trust yr self trust yr self. it comes to you at first in gold threads, untangling slowly, but still very much there. And from that point it wraps itself around you until you feel like there is nothing else left but for you to entice itself amongst your own fibres that are often tangled and brittle- sometimes without purpose or direction – once these threads have clambered onto you you start feeling the goodwill course through you and you believe in it. if you believe in it enough it is real and if it is real it matters. And then slowly- if you believe enough- the gold intoxicates you. Things are not always real but they nearly always feel real.
i am trying to compact my life into quieter words, deflating every thought i have into a dull ache that that i cannot pull out, so i grind my teeth at night until i have none left
and i have nightmares where i have dead vessels solid weights inside my mouth that can tear into skin and chew my words into a better person, and i want an edible personality something that does not have to be drunk down with water, i have razors beyond my lips that are eroding with everything sweet, you are telling me about our future and i am trying to hide the fact that i have my past inside my mouth, that you are talking about sleeping next to, that you will never able to cross, that shuts down when my voice trespasses and i still have nightmares where i have teeth and i am wearing them down into something that i can tame, and i will sip through straws and i will not tell anyone about the edges that trap my nerves and lacerate my promises and hover over everything i say and i am opening my mouth in the rain and trying to fill my body with water as a way to compensate
driftwood will find its way to a home an emperor penguin that turns away from its pack will not turn back it will swim two thousand miles and not admit it is wrong in fifty years time it will be possible to speak through grinding teeth primitive vibrations tuned to our heartbeats and trauma loneliness will become the biggest taboo and medical research will predict our last breath and match us with someone who will die in the same second my blood flows backwards and retreats it did not sign for this to move on is to corner a piece of time and wring it dry of its weight to look at bobbing bits that manage to survive and know it cannot be used for fuel to get home i do not know what lies beneath my nails and that is just a fraction of uncertainty i live with every day i heard a politician describe it as a privilege to live in the end times that we are the closer to the apocalypse that we have ever been that heaven is a pill that makes everything feel new i pray for the apocalypse for my body to melt to be consumed fully vines on loop lend themselves to a familiarity bias so that future generations can fall in love more easily that relationships will soon mirror the exploding sun above us
see you
soon
i have begun to name our fights after constellations// i am going to go to coney island and ride every ride and my new memories will toughen up and punch out the old ones and we’ll spend their lunch money on skateboards and tattoos // and i will be born again and i am going to break my phone so that people can’t hear me but i can hear them and i will hear them speak blindly into the darkness looking for something to rebound off and it will save them and my phone becomes a free therapy session number passed around london, trapping each insecurity inside a shaking voicemail. i will see u one night eating up breadcrumbs yr parents left for you and i join u and we’re doing this together and you’ll say its funny how creases in our fingertips tell us who we are but not how far you can run when yr past has a headstart nor the amount of breathe u can reach in and steal from someone. the universe is expanding. the middle of a really long sigh. it will contract and suck us in or spit us out. we are a stone in the universe’s lung it accidentally swallowed
in the future sounds will stick to surfaces and the cities will be too much to bare and people will lock themselves in their rooms and the past will vibrate around us even the sounds you thought you only thought and the government will use our bedroom as a way to convince others that love is something we put ourselves through my heart will kill me one day i am moving through the street filled with organs that will give up on me one day i am cradling my body through the street i am trying to give them all the air and blood they need i wish it was this simple// i will kiss u back into a time when we could breath underwater we will swim until we learn the name of every fish not the scientific names but our own names for them like button nose and smashed pint glass we will tell everyone ‘you have seen 0.1% of the sea but we have seen it all’ .
the moon is tied to the earth with an invisible rope every planet and star we see is tied to the earth with invisible rope and each year the ropes grow weaker and its the job of every ghost of every person who dies to hold onto these ropes, a tug of war with the universe. clouds are a bundle of 2am text messages huddling together for warmth and planes tremble through them and this is the last time i will mark your lawn with my back. my words are wet cement on a busy suburban road the earth will continue to rotate and the earth will continue to turn its back to the sun and moon this is the last time i will say the word ‘platypus’ to you i think we are watching a nature documentary i think we are giggling i don’t realize it at the time but this is the only time i will ever say the word ‘platypus’ to you . it wasn’t something that came up a lot just once but that was my only chance to say it you may hear the word again i’m sure u will but it won’t be mine i hope i didn’t stutter i hope i said it well
i find myself setting arbitrary goals as a way to coping with the view of a never-ending horizon. i am going to move to new york and swallow my alienation and detachment but in a way that feels like calming white noise when even infomercials go off the air. you'll be there, we won't talk. the light at the end of the tunnel reaches your face in the backseat next to mine on the car ride home at 3am and i am going to end up in hospital because i am 80% water and 7% of my body weight is blood and i dehydrate myself at night to fit more of you in my dreams. i ask you on my hospital bed whether you can smell the burning and you kiss me on temples to remind me that you know the weakest spots of my skull and i want reach out to your belly button and i wrap myself around your waist and i rest my head to your stomach to hear what futures and plans you have been swallowing in the last five minutes. i can hear plane tickets and cat names fermenting, i can hear the echoes of overrated coffee shops and broken umbrellas and rain soaked hair boil in your belly . my tongue is on fire. i saw this on adventure time once. finn kissed a rock and gave it to flame princess to kiss and that was a kiss, and if that can be a kiss, i will press my lips to this note before i leave and we will be kissing every night. we sit in valium cushioned bathtubs and swollen thoughts cover us and your fingertips race along the porcelain edge slowing down each lap and we fall asleep to the sound of rain battling against your window. holding in your breath is a conscious act// holding in your breath is a conscious act. you ask me what i think about when i fall asleep i say that scene in gravity where sandra bullock is flung into space without a safety cord i feel warm you ask again and i see myself reaching inside a hornet's nest with my bare hands and you ask me again and i say i keep a list of survival guides hidden in my favourites pages of my favourite books.
on petrichor perfume:
a
caustic phantom limb, i still feel the weight of you jumping on me mid-morning stomach plunging like french presses. like a torch shining into the cavities of my ribs and i lie still praying for no hidden treasure. no gold reticent wealth.
i opened you gently but it rained cruelly, a microcosmic apocalypse in our biome. we open our mouths to catch the past on our tongues snowflakes melt inside our mouths, swallowed individual moments now stitched applique on our chests, bite marks torn off of each others ears now i pick at the skin over my hips, the skin on my lips snake like shredding i will become a warm blooded fool for you.
i try to breathe in every colour i can see in the sky i can feel them fill up my lungs as the ink seeps out of blue blue blue, every headache i get (every day) i am reminded that my brain does not fit inside my body every summer i am reminded that sunburns on the back are the loneliest sunburns i try to maintain a semblance of normalcy in my day to day thoughts but i leave them chained to the pole when i go for a shop we have dinner over tenement flat balconies and later on morning light will find itself sleeping in between our bodies, there are dust specks floating around eyes that i have trained myself to ignore, the more and more i watch documentaries about ant colonies and the more and more i cry over ingrained sacrifice and the sieve we inherit that even ants try to fill, the emptiness that we give ourselves to, the more and more during our lifetimes we will try to maintain a regular heartbeat, we place our bodies in between different bodies in different parts of the world, we add meaning to the vibrations between us because that’s how we can look back at the end of our lives when we can no longer drag our bodies to doorstep porches at 2am with a seemingly infinite number of apartment number doorbells lost between your fingers, spaces where words are exhausted and broken and try to take a nap in the stretched-out sips of beer and cigarette teethings i long to break myself apart dissolve all the cracks and find myself whole, i yearn to drink a coffee from a diner and know that my bones are my own and these are the people i will fragment myself for all over again// i am nervous.
will anyone ever make out with me under the bleachers when i am 16 skipping class smoking cigarettes
slept-on arm feelings, fuzzy and blurry inside, unsure what the rest of my body feels. i want to kiss you but not kiss you // i want to kiss you through the wall // i want to kiss you with smiles bursting through cheeks // a last kiss before our friend shows up // a kiss that means nothing that means nothing that warms up our hands on a seaside bench at 7am // a kiss a kiss where lips mean nothing feel nothing but i notice how your fingers curls up, and your hand floats along an invisible wave suspended for a time until you open your eyes // the same notes playing across our fingertips // the subtle gestures that mean nothing to you that mean nothing that i love
the templates i use in emails are seeping in real life conversations. i am using coffee to supplement and ultimately replace a sense of purpose a way to speed up late night break downs. i am trying to shape this water into something worth forming. i am trying to teach it to stand on its own. i feel very uncomfortable around my own words and so i don’t open my mouth. i love everyone and you all of a sudden and all very much but then the bus driver says my card is out of money because my reminder washed off my palm in the shower. i am looking for a night that ends with a declaration that things will start again on the first train home. or a night where i end up sleeping in my friends bathtub and your soft eyelids drag me into a world where i don’t have to worry about blood sloshing around inside of me only held in by my skin and clenched-closed mouth. i have a recycling bin that i keep trying to empty but it always tells me everything is ‘in use’ everything is always in use
i wish i could store my fuck-ups in a wine cellar and hope they get better with age i wish i was successful enough to own a wine cellar.
it would be easier to say this was it, this was it, this was it we are at your best friend’s flat and i have just walked in i tell the boy in the corner than the earth’s ocean has been humming to us since we were born but at a pitch only few can hear, and i ask if you can hear it and he tried to press his lips against my words and i thought about the space i was occupying within my body and how i didn’t know what my tongue was attached to or who these people thought they were talking to and how i wish i could squeeze into the silence after you kissed me
an idea for a date: you take my phone, and i take yours, and we sit on the opposite sides of the empty living room, and we listen to each other’s overdue voicemails, and we can look into each others eyes, don’t speak, but nod, and smile, and i will feel safe listening to your mom tell me that it is your brother’s birthday and your friend from the internet waiting outside a party for you to answer the door, shouting above the music sometime after 2am, and i wonder if he’s still waiting for you at the door, until my eyes drift back to you, the light is holding you with a soft palm, and i press 3 to delete all, and we turn off our phones and turn off the lights and meet in the middle and we have forgotten ourselves as bodies only thin whispers above the flashing traffic below the window and you tell me, you are here with me, we are both completely and intensely here, and i’m sorry for how much of you i will never be able to give back.
1. The Moon thinks Go Set A Watchman is a sluggish portrayal of disillusionment 2. Only the Moon knows the truth about 9/11 3. . It hates the satellites that freckle its view of the Earth 4. The Moon trembles on escalators 5. The Earth adopted the Moon but doesn’t want to tell it.
6. It secretly knows this and is drifting away from Earth to try and find its biological mother. 7. It’s favourite Batman film is Batman Begins because of Liam Neeson 8. The flag poles hurt 9. The Moon only exists in the future 10. Whenever you wake up at night, the Moon is trying to speak to you 11. The Moon is Liam Neeson’s biggest fan. It is yours too.
i guess it wouldn’t be so bad if i could do it with a touch more eloquence less cruel reptilian tongued insults thrown with my mouth still full from last month's offal never pause between a kill and hope it’s a chair of lightning at the end waiting cos i swear i will burn and gut out what doesn’t love me. my modesty didn’t hide what the needle couldn’t unpick your hem too high couldn’t cover the red cells burning in my cheeks. and god i hope he thinks of joan of arc and i hope i start burning for something.
you will not always be a rag doll.
there is nothing left under the bed i have shelved it all upstairs in the library- there is not restricted section- it is all upstairs walk freely on this tarmac, get the maze of tunnels that lead to the piles of bones that once shone before a comet before the dust before the freckles appeared on my face all lonely and purposeful you connect them up one night and i walk out the next morning, forgetful, clumsy, but with a map of every resourceful thing this planet offers right in front of me and you laugh when i come back from work with it still there and ask why why didn’t i wash it off and i reply i was scared that if i wash it off the planet might explode because here and here and across the bridge of my nose is where the stars live where the dust of dinosaurs dwell waiting and shining.
i hve paid reparations to you crossed off the freckles that dared impeach unsheafed skin, taken in to my body yr demands - sat unresponsive but tuned to your station. gluttony sat bloated as we drank something french. you are well versed in greek tragedy but never liked my impressions... everytime i start writing lately my brain freezes in panic scared of what it might say outside of parentheses. the thghts collaspe into each other i hold the pen too hard and i can never find one that works. i want to be in clear salt water that i will swallow too much of and later throw up over my shoes. i want to feel it in my pores in the wake of being crushed by sisyphus’ boulder i’m jst not into anymore, in the wake of 20smething years of age and nothing tangible apart from my body. i have tried to cut off my head thinking i could lizard like grow a new thought center less selfish more pure piously intentioned to hold aloft my failing moulded skin cage in the shape of the crescent moon. on my bed each dawn i was the sun you didn’t want to rise. my feet embalmed with mud- i tore each of our souls in half from the ground up and now i can wait serene, a little stream following the sun’s trajectory, east west, east west.it is hard to write with you on my mind. but i love it .
what it is to feel real what it is to escape the disconnect between my reality yr reality and the blaring 24 hour televeision reality what it is to be loved and know it and not over-compensate is yr ribcage smashing up mine this is the rest of our lives in a minute i feel as pretentious as i deserve to feel i am opaque lying on my yoga mat pretending it’ll make a difference if i start smoking again start drinking those tiny beers again i can fit two in the lining of my coat pocket i like christmas cos everything feels artificial but everyone is in on it i can smile with eggnog glow emanating i can sit comfortable knowing nothing on christmas means forever but it can feel like it, just for then. just long enough for a temporary tattoo to wash off but the other 364 days where i’m not sure if i mean much to poets feels soaked with mildew and hollow but i’ll keep kissing your knuckles
/////tearing off your own flesh isn’t supposed to taste of butterscotch candy. the type tussled up in golden foil that I used to stick in collages at pre-school (look it’s the sun) but it did and i licked feeling raw thinking of all the cool tattoos i could get eventually in five years, to cover over the disaster- the blood still left on tarmac after the crash- when the skin healed up and it’s just shiny scars.
m umbling trash
you write so much you have ink leaking out of your loosened fingernails tht you wounded by incessant anxious biting during school// it became ultra grotesque (sometimes hinted at parties that your verbosity is throwaway debris to an explosion we all wished we’d seen ((but it was offscreen)) // imagine the fire spitting febrile words that you, pasty, found ungrateful whilst you ruminated to a playlist entitled ‘mozart study music’ exulted at finding a higher power againwhatever the something is tht you gave yourself to in your youth// still dewy eyed, an altar boy cloaked with oil painted saints watching/ you in the shower rhapsodic. my father was always 3pm wilted // wet lips agape at the empties tht lined up then fell then lined up and domino-ed again// mother waterboarded me with cabbage. i threw up every schoolday morning watery green for a month// spent most of last semester hiding behind the PE sheds haired pulled tightly away //from three girls i called transparent in spite. homemade haircuts ghost you in clumpy regrowth/ casual reminders a playful tug at your distrust of someone with scissors ever since that one incident at the lido four summers ago now// your parents were having new kitchen tiles when you first created yourself in the public bathroom mirror blunt //you were sick and they had forgotten/ /left to walk the three miles home// again.// but you are not a victim// solipsism is passe// backlash relapse// horrified they dragged you to the barbers// you mewed in the backseat// your head shone with a halo for a half a year.
listen to drake, sleep the sleep of the gentle, kiss kiss, goodnight.