Dear God,

Do you want me to be grateful
for the way the clouds curl around each other
like ringlets falling from a hairband?
Because I will be, if you want.
And if I tell you the truth
I think I’m going to have to be
because I can’t find any other thing so beautiful.
I’m looking at the world through a view-finder
and I can’t find much that’s pretty these days.

My calf is pressed against the calf of a girl
who I considered for years to be a best friend of mine.
She felt empty
and so she inflated herself with
hot air and “banter” with no meaning.
“***** Please” and “Ohmygod” and “*******”
spew from her awkward, Christian mouth
and I wonder whether she scooped her insides out
like pumpkin flesh
and inserted somebody new there in her place
like a candle in a jack'o'lantern.
Somebody who doesn’t have the time for me.
So I give up on our small talk
and decide not to interrupt her mobile phone;
I feel the back of her head like a headache.

“Mum’s sweated off four-hundred-and-seventy-six calories today”
she tells me and I ask her how she knows.
“She’s a got a tag thingy, you know. I have too.”

I can’t bear the sound of calories.
They are nails on all my chalkboards
and they are the wrong-footed *****
that tolls in church.

I lower my gaze to the absent-minded mother
whose fingers climb into her pram
to draw circles on the baby’s scalp.
She stirs my thoughts with them.
I think I’ve come a long way since
I started this prayer,
since my eyes hit the clouds.

Someone once told me that the thing he hated above all else
was greed
because greed is a bonfire that hungers without ever feeling full.
And who reminded me that
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We got the greed we hungered for.

And it corrupted us absolutely.

For it is by greed that the ice caps
are sweating off more calories
than the girls in their gym shorts.

It is by greed that they cannot rest
until they have peeled their thighs far enough apart
and by greed that they’ve been lured into the propaganda store
to buy themselves diets.

It is by greed that we cannot look our world in the eye
and greed that necessitates the use of a microscope lens
to distance us from the damage we cause.

It is by greed that we underline the little problems
to cover up the big ones
and it is greed that enables us to find offense in the weather forecast.

It is greed that has shrunk my values into a cage of bitter ribs
and greed that provoked my self-righteous verbal slaughter
of that friend I no longer know.

It is by greed that we started deciding that land belonged to people –
that finders were keepers, as long as they were white –
instead of the earth it consists of.

It is by greed that we doggedly avoid breaking our routines apart
to fit other factors into them.

It is by greed that righteousness
and ******
fall into step
on the path towards a religion that God can’t condone.

It is by greed that fascism and communism
eclipse one another and meld into one.

It is by greed that the old woman opposite
refuses to share her seat or even her smile
with a human under the age of thirty.

It is by greed that kids have bullets in them
and mothers are shot full of infection
and the water runs dry
through the dripping tap we didn’t fix in our bathroom.

It is by greed that I sit on a bus
and shift my problem onto our backs
with my view-finder.

And yeah,
I still see some beauty when I look for it
but I see beauty like a picture postcard
that an angry kid took a hole punch to.
It got so torn up but we refuse to put it under a light
in order to avoid seeing just how many gaps we’ve made.
Recently I’ve noticed this postcard’s
got too many holes in it to be able to see
what the picture once was.
There’s more absent than present
and, sure, we’ve still got our itty-bitty blue-sky-days
between the punctures,
but the grime and the guilt seeps out
like the air we drove our dreams on.

What a mess we inflicted, I think.

There’s a ceiling light in our toilet that attracts flies to it.
They fly in and burn up
and the lamp bowl fills with insect corpses
until you can’t see through them anymore.
We’re like that.
Flies go suicide bombing
and ***** things up
with the clutter they leave behind them.
Meanwhile,
as long as the dead stay in their graves,
they don’t bother the rest.
We look up at the ceiling
and don’t change the lightbulb.

How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?

We like looking at our world from the atmosphere;
we observe it from the internet,
believing that we stand on the moon,
too far away to touch the gashes we’ve torn.
We don’t like looking at the way the blood runs;
we tuck it under our fingernails instead
and hope no one holds us accountable.

When I come home I snap at my mum
because I am so struck by the brokenness of what I’m dealing with
that I cannot have her ask me how my day was.
Because I cannot complain about the weather
but I need to
because our family conversation is not big enough
to grapple with the magnitude of the genuine complaints I have.
Because I cannot simply tell her that I hate America
or feel comfortable praying her this prayer.
So I tell her “OK” and she rolls her eyes at the kettle.

So I’ve got my dish-cloth heart
and the rain starts to spit at us
with tears that are heavy enough to weep the things I can’t shed.

Wash me clean, rain… heaven… God,
because most people put ***** dishcloths in the bin
not the washing machine.

Trying to find
Profound things to say
About the escaping day
Swimming like those bubbles
You blew as a kid into the garden sky
About endings and capture
And letting pretty birds fly

The sky folds into grey
Peach slashes between ceilings

He names each nook and cranny of the coast
As it shuffles imperceptibly closer
“Ever thought of sailing places?”
And just like that
Father to eldest son
He p
         O
            U
              R
               S
The sea into him

“Sometimes it good to be home”
She says of the chalk cliffs
And the purplest of greens
Bruising the horizon

dreams crumple
hearts break
Its a wonder anything lasts
I would give anything
to see the light in your eyes
to feel the heat of your skin
to tell you
you are not alone
show you
its ok to be
different
the light
is gone from my world
like the breath from your lungs
good-bye

Dear You,

     I hope your day is wonderful. I want all of your days to be wonderful. I want you to wake up and smell roses, or dance in the rain, or be able to look in the mirror and just smile. I want you to know that someday you will make someone so incredibly happy, and that you'll be their whole world. I want you to know that you are incredible. You're perfectly imperfect. You're so special.

     I want you to know that you're my happiness. And I know that we are just friends and that I shouldn't feel the way that I feel because you couldn't feel the way that I feel and it isn't fair for me to even think that we could be anything other than friends, but I think about you all the time. I dream about you every night. You're the first thought when I wake up in the morning, and you're the my final prayer every evening.

     I want you to know that I am completely aware that this could never be anything at all. You aren't interested, and it has nothing to do with me but with my gender. No matter how many drunken nights you say otherwise, you will wake up sober and only want a woman. And I want you to want me all the time.

     I want you to know that I'm okay with that, because there is absolutely nothing else I can do. I can't change who I am to please you, and I would never want to anyway. I want you for who you are, and I want you all  the time.

     I want you to know that I would love you unconditionally, that I would give the world to you, all wrapped in a little bow if it would make you smile- God, I love your smile.

    I want you to know that in this whole wide world there are 7 billion people, and each and every individual is beautiful in their own unique way. In this world there are 7 billion different faces with different personalities, all of which will fall in love, smile, fall out of love, hurt, and fall in love with a different person all over again.

     I want you to know that within those 7 billion people there is only one you, and you are perfectly imperfect. You are the only person I want. I could spend the rest of my days looking at your face and that would be okay. I don't need an incredible life with fame and fortune, because having you would be the most fortunate thing.

     And I want you to know that even though you'll never want me, you are all I've ever wanted.

this is my body
all awkward limbs & jagged frame
a mountain of bones
arranged haphazardly around wooden joints
i didn't want to be a “real boy”
but i didn't want to be a real girl either
i wanted to be a beach ball
or a kite
now my throat is a chimney
my lungs are a fire
& i don’t care who’s between my legs
as long as they spread me
like bible pages
that’s to say,
i don’t believe in god
unless i’m getting nailed
or writing boys eulogies in my underwear
the way i draw maps on my skin
to where the wild things went
i think monster in the closet
is synonymous with my coming out of it
skeletons and all
clinging to me
like dream catchers
full of expectation
that got caught in their nets
that’s why i take
"proceed with caution"
signs so seriously
and i do,
i do at night when i am alone
far from home
& scared that my gay is showing
i do
when boys want more
than to just split me in two
& leave both halves of me
draped over the bed
i do
when it comes to loving him
so unconditionally
that my heart feels like
the only muscle in my body
with any fight left
this is my body
it’s bent & broken
with anxieties
but it is mine.

You shouldn't be ashamed
love shouldn't be like this
Your burning hearts forced to be tamed
after sharing a midnight's kiss

Her skin against yours
how it just feels so right
Her eyes how they lure
and you hold her through the night

But during the  day
you must hide
with the sun's rays
your love must subside

Forbidden romance
but you don't know why
when the world lashes out
you want to cry

Forbidden Romance
Forbidden kiss
love is love
but not like this