i wake up and i think of you
and i look out of my window
it is grey and the lights stopped
glittering a long time ago
and i smoke and i smoke and i smoke

i pour my coffee and i think of you
my mugs are stained, the blemishes plaster the
cups and never come off. they have left
their mark, exactly they way you stamped yours
and i smoke and i smoke and i smoke

the shower beats my skin and i think of you
i scrub; i scratch my pores with soap
but the filth resides, it clings and
fills my orifices. i am choked by dirt
and i smoke and i smoke and i smoke

i exist through my days and i think of you
everything is dampened by desolation and every
one has your eyes. this city repulses me, it sneers
at me and growls ‘there is nothing to keep you here’
and i smoke and i smoke and i smoke.

when i was drunk i rang you and you didn't pick up your phone.
i came to your house and bashed the door until
my knuckle bones ripped in two. my fingers were
ripped from my palm from trying to reach you.

i left my pinkie finger in your post box.
when you found it in the morning you
rang me up and told me that you had it for breakfast
along with my dignity and left me alone
with my infidelity.

i tried to stop your calcium intake so that you would never grow
i wanted you to shrink so that i could keep you in my pocket
and you could gnaw through the fabric and plunge onto my toes.

i would walk you everywhere that i go. you would see all that i see
eventually, you would be so small, you would crawl into my ear
and scratch through my skull.

you could infiltrate my thoughts and penetrate my nervous system.
and then maybe you could feel all that i feel and realise that’s it's you

like sitting beside the window feeling tortured by the torrential rain, wishing that it was pounding at my surface, scratching away at my pores.

having bluegrass melodies sweeping up my ears, filling them with banjos and voices as cavernous as the grand canyon

and watching you laying on the carpet, your legs crossed, rolling a cigarette as if you were caressing skin,
being careful as if you were rolling my veins, controlling the blood flow to my heart,

making it swell to burst.

i feel choked by my words,
they are swelling inside my skull
and they are lathering me in sentiment and folly.

my pen has become my enemy
and a regret that i cannot conquer.
they join inside of me

and plait themselves together in sentences
weaving into my brain and stifling their
surge to my fingers and suffocate my wit.

if i could i would wrap my mouth
around my head and heave the knitted words
from my brain and lay them
onto my white blank page, but,

my words, they imprison me, they grip
me behind steel bars of language
and i anguish, i anguish.

inhaling the ocean breeze and feeling it empty my lungs makes me feel completely intact

i can taste the salt in its entirety on my tongue and i try to scrape it all off with my front teeth

i feel the waves roaring over my heart, liberating it from veins and its arteries, the sea filling the orifices of my organs

the shores stones crowd at my toes and break my skin, but i am cleansed

i stride into the water and it seeps into my nostrils and my intellect becomes infiltrated by the sea, my lungs are suffocated by the wet

and i am completely intact

I felt every cell of each of your knuckles
As it collided with my cheekbone
And as my face was ripped from its symmetry
I felt my heart crash into my stomach
And regurgitate out of my lips.

i have relied on circumstance and fate all of my life.
god has never shone down on me and occupied
my life with luck.

i have lived with compromise and attainment without the need for belief
i have never had a calling or had the
ghost pierce through my organs and save me.

today i watched you make your first communion and
you have never been so bright. your innocence,
highlighted in your glow. faith enveloped you
and you enveloped me.

i have been told one million times that
love conquers all but it seems the coordinates
of my existence have never been found or
voyaged too. i thought i had found my destination
in you, i guess the atlas i used was obsolete and rotten.
i tried to sail away from you but i arrived
at stormy seas, the north star i followed burned
like your kisses, which scorched my mouth like
my first menthol cigarette. when i tried to
soar, you crashed into me like a wrecking ball.
and we came down, blaring, burning as you
touched my skin turning it to ash

i wish i could swim the pacific ocean and back.

and when i came back to sit in front of a burning burning fire

until it dried me to the bone.

and for my skeleton to be hung above your bed

to act as a catcher of your night terrors

and it would work

because you would know that i was magical.

because i swam the whole pacific ocean and back.

for you.