One day
Someone will invent the word for books which are beautiful and hurtful and hateful at the same time
Bibliomortem
And one day
Someone will invent the word for the taste of cheese on toast
Caseusromanorum
And one day
Someone will invent the word for being too many different things to be anything because there is no one person that you are sure you can be and no one aspiration that you’re sure you can keep
Multimendacium
And one day
Someone will invent the word for saying promises when you know you can’t keep them but want to be able to
Fenusaccipiepromissum
And one day
Someone will invent the word for the point at the end of laughter when you’ve nothing left to give and a silence still to fill
Risustrangulare
And one day
Someone will invent the cure for loneliness
Bibliomortem

I am a vault of secrets, and you are the healing light
that will flush them all out. I have known since
I was very young that most things should be kept
up inside my head where they belong.

He grows on me
His branch and tree
A stretched out mist
Pet villainy

My rosy friend
My sweet defend
You’re not my mind
It cannot end

How touched we are
To outshine a star
Beneath the stream
The Venom tar

Dance along
My dance, my song
A body weave
Of threads so long

Now check my grip
Now blush my lip
We’re friends so now
Well water sip

Six a.m. and the morning leans
To kiss the night;
The streets are full of stars
And sleepwalking business suits

The citrus woman
With peroxide blonde hair
And peroxide blonde fingers
If she spoke I imagine it would sound
Like lemon trees and smoke
Her cigarette burns holes in the sky
But when she passes me by
She smells like the Boots Cosmetics Isle
She paints the yellowed-ivory
Of her finger-claws
With crystallised orange
To cover the nicotine stains
And maybe I think I recognise
My lemonade shampoo
And tangerine hand wash
Like a setting sun over Sicily

The beer can boy
With stuffed up hair
And a stuffed up liver
He’s grey like a November playground
Once all the children have grown
And he’s hole-punched right through
I might think he was heart-broken
And trying to see how many other lost souls
The bottoms of bottles hold
If he wasn’t here every morning
Lolling down the pavement
Like a spring stretched too far
Asking for a paper
That I’m not allowed to give
And trying to drown himself
In the pooled rain under the streetlights

The coat-and-cardie bundle
With wind-swept hair
And wind-swept grimace
Like a tornado tore up
The geography of her personality
And left it with just a bike and a death wish
And those features heaped together
Between chimney-tops and table tops
For consolation
Her feet on the pedals while her hair throttles
Because she’s unlit
Unseen, unprotected
And she rides like this morning is the last
As if she knows that skulls
Crack like eggshells sometimes
And handlebars are sometimes not in front of you.

If my Dad was here he’d see
A smoker
A drunk
A dangerous cyclist
But I see lemon zest and love hearts and black liquorish
After all I’m at home
Among these mistakes
That the morning hours make

a piece of teacher’s
chalk

writes
to my brother’s
gut
of he

who swallows
fire
to cremate
god
the *****

donor

I should have never believed you
when you said 'everything was going to be okay'

I'm watching them bury you six feet deep
and all I can think about
is how we can meet again

I know if you were here
you'd hold my arm down
and whisper in my ear
'don't shed a tear, you'll survive'

but you're not here
and no ones left to pin me down
it's me and my brain
and everything is a sign
telling me-
'you're better off dead'