I want to love and live,
But, as always, I am held back by you.

Maybe I will catch someone's eye
The way she catches mine.

Those three words;
hurt me, burn
me, know me.
Desolate delight. I
will burden you
with identity. I
will ache for
my divine shadows
to return. Yet
the clouds parted
and I saw
truth, some strange
recognition within, brought
by my thoughts.
"I know you."

You tell me you want to know,
but tell me what you really mean.
Through the lines, you say, "Lie to me",
scattered dilapidation being the incorrect
way of being. I must let this darkness out,
yet instead I give you light. If only
the light I lied was enough to permeate
my dreary, opaque existence.

Loneliness can only be washed away by my thoughts, but, counting seconds until I drown, I no longer have the time to save myself.

To the bone I am becoming,
losing track of what I wanted to be,
I'll find myself being pencilled in
with grayscale tones painted over me.

To the bone I am becoming,
break my fingers, my limbs and my soul,
you'll touch me as you wish, burning me thin,
'til I'm fragile - no parts of a whole.

To the bone, I am becoming,
even though I'm desperate to try,
because all I can taste is your hands on my skin
and bitter and dark was the fight.

To the bone, I am becoming,
I'm addicted to losing control.
My bedroom is littered with matchsticks and gin,
To the bone
To the bone
To the bone.

Where am I? It's like home
but it's so dark,
so dark and so empty.
I can still see the temporary tattoos
of your fingerprints on my flesh,
the nausea pooling within me,
my tense body screaming
for you to get away from me.
The way you heard another word
as my lips spelled out "No."
Now you sleep wondering
where you went wrong
and I lie awake wondering
what the hell gave you the right
to tear apart my flesh
with manipulative hands. I am only
half a woman.
The other half of my flesh
is swarming with searing
hot agony, agony which is quiet
and shows itself
in wild, trauma-worn eyes
and a drowning
heart. I should feel
angry but I only have vacancy,
and my mind is filled
with nothing except the dust
you left in my bones
once the cold, loveless
touch had left my body.

I feel unsafe now, even though I'm not
in that place. He really does trump them all,
doesn't he - the bigots and fascists,
homophobes and racists alike. He is
going to lead them and unite his country
in hatred against us. We are becoming
afraid again, the lost and the ostracised,
so we will hide from the people who will
reverse our progression into the light and
lock us in the darkness of a conservative
world. But it will not be enough. They will
find us, they will shame us and they will neglect
us, sending us back to the fear and danger
of being free. They will tear our wings from
our backs and leave us to die, bloodied and
trampled, in the dust that is settling
on our "freedom".

I will,
You just have to trust me.
One day, I will wake up and decide that it is my time,

To focus on me
And allow myself to be happy,
But right now, I need to feel this way.

I can't tell you that,
You wouldn't understand.
But feeling this is so much better

Than feeling nothing at all.
You just have to trust me,
I will.

They were so wrapped up in themselves all the time
That they wasted away their lives,
But their toppling equilibriums then settled in unison
And they caught each other's eyes.

It's strange how I didn't even know
I missed you until I saw your face
from the other side of the crowd
and my heart knew it all, instantaneously.

This is a second sky, where blue rises
above all else with lucrative secrecy
and darkness lurks beneath the clouds,
a universe where the atmosphere
is the darkest black and space
is the purest of blues. This is an unknown
place where fear and dominance rule
all that was once considered 'normal',
something you can no longer have
when the satellites turn their eyes
on you. Everything real becomes fake,
everything right is wrong,
and all you know
is that you know nothing
and they know everything. The hidden,
black, forgotten web of constellations
spelt out in dusts of white across
the blue night, where the featureless
omens of this reality circle
with crooked, evil wit,
is pulling me in with its charm.
Now, I am yet another fly
caught in the tides of this spider,
doomed to drown in silk.

Have voice from between silence and authority,
so that reassuring quick compulsions as you destroy
and attack can last. None of the silent and empty men,
or boys, believe in living memory, only
in the evening dusk and foggy morning.
I thought about everyone else, kept away,
in my cold considering of the sun and night and helpless
sound. Away but in an awful time, back in circles,
lost as ever and wandering in a helpless way.
There was a stranger by the grass and I could see
his eyes, quick and cold and hard. I was seeing my senses -
sight, smell - and a faintness seemed to topple away
and leave me alone, where there were no strangling men
or *****, far-away wildernesses. Foul and torn, a cruel
face with no eyes hit the bone and screamed a breathless,
lungless scream, as though the whole place had stood up,
******, and left. I should have died.
Noise was coming from hard men's voices, white burning
and white flesh, when they saw and called out to them.
Rasping on the thorns, I understood that the boy,
and everything else, was like an acorn falling
from the oak tree. The man left and I went slowly
rolling into the choice I was choking on.

Vanity shows itself in the smallest
fragments of her body, so subtle it
is almost invisible. Throw away
the measurements, the calculations,
and suddenly you will see ***, victory,
prosperity embodied in the sea foam
of her eyes. Your mind will circle
with body and beauty until you will
be found. She will expose you
for who you really are, someone who sees
all of the magnificent beauty of the sun
in their own reflection. She'll never learn,
she'll never learn. So we must shame her.
Push her away in fiery envy and
destroy her victory so the damage
is done and she cannot be healed.
Persuasion and shame
lick her lips with a cunning tongue, ready
to say whatever must be said in order
to convince me to love her
once more.
I will not heal her.
I will not heal her.

There are words within me
that flow through keys into music,
or ink into paper,
when I write the ballads of sadness and love
that are contained inside my head,
yet nothing comes to my tongue
when I stand in front of you.
I have never been verbal,
one of the poets who stands
and speaks their beauty to others, tongues
of silk weaving their words into impermanent art
that will soon be forgotten.
Instead, I write poetry
which your eyes will never see
in the hopes that I will find a way
of saying how you make me feel inside.
The way you capture me
and manage to see me as an entirely new being.
The way you make my laugh permanent
with a single image, childish and playful.
The way you are so unapologetically you.

All of it.

I want something just like this,
I want everything like this,
and I don't know how to say it.

I fill myself up for you to take it all away,
Watching the flood commence as you do so.
The broken waters that refreshed my being;
Smiling through the day, crying through the night;
You always liked putting old agonies in sealed bottles.

Falling faces as sunshine turns to dust inside,
Stuck telling the time on a long-broken clock.
Minds wandering as beasts draw nearer,
Blood in their eyes. ****** on their breath.
Killing it and taking me with. Instant relief.

I breathe.

She hoped all her life that one day,
When she woke up,
The person she fell out of love with a long time ago
Would disappear.

She hoped that one day,
The hideousness of who she was would melt and drip away
So the light would shine on her
And she could be divine.

She hoped that the person she was destined
To spend eternity with would come to her,
Because she didn't want to spend her lifetime
With that person she had never loved.

But one day she realised
That she did not need to disappear to be perfect.
She realised that the light she had never seen before
Resided within her and was always shining through.

One day,
Through the dreams and nightmares,
She woke up.

He loves me, they all love me.

If I just stopped singing, then he
would realise the monster I am
and he would run.

But I love him too,
and for the life of me,
I can't stop singing for him.

Nothing. There is nothing within me, I
don't feel anything except the overwhelming
burn of tears in my eyes. I am
cynical and bitter, sad and destroyed,
and apathetic towards everything.

Except you.

You have brought a lighter colour to these
rotting walls - you are a vivid, emotive
shade of life. You brought me back to this fervent,
dizzying wildness that never stops tossing
and turning within me, even in the
motionless depths of darkness. Apathy
has been turned into an eager chaos,
the weather dissolving into northern green
around me as my tireless eyes gleam,
reflected in yours.

There's an avalanche miles above,
I can hear it. It was created
by my shouts of glee
cracking and breaking
the surface of the ice,
causing glittering universes to cascade
into the depths and extinguish
the fires of the ******.
The shadows are striping your body
into a silhouette, light hitting
nowhere, blind eyes gazing at me
in psychedelia.
There's a snowstorm inside you
and it's going to freeze
the chaos within me,
save me from them molten decay
burning its way through me.
I'm buried under decades
of ice, the brightest white,
healing me as the old sun
finally reaches my skin.

If I could travel on a one way ticket
to the other side of the universe
instantaneously, I would do it
and take the other one. My scientist, my
love, my strayed away boy who will never
be. If those wormholes we dream of existed,
we would be together in a heartbeat
and away even sooner.

She was just a caterpillar before,
But now she is a butterfly like you.
And as I wither away into my cocoon,
I hope that, someday, I'll be a butterfly too.

I never thought it would be like this, but
writer's block has become a person, and
you are him. You take my words in a wisp
of the wind and they whisper away from
me. I put my pen to paper and the
ink turns invisible as I move, for how
could I write something beautiful about you
when you are capable of being every word at once -
an entire dictionary with only one meaning.

You make the light shine brighter
And the weight feel lighter,
And you open my eyes to the new,
So now my heart will love more
Than it could do before,
And that's all because of you.

An inconceivable fiction that
somehow became a tangible reality.
I am at a loss without *you.

You are falling down a rabbit hole of
hatred for yourself, and I hate you for
it. I hate the part of your mind that turns
you against yourself, for you don't deserve
it. I am at the bottom with you, for
every pace upwards I will be there
to push you, but I fear that I will not
be strong enough to keep you upright for
the time it takes you to return to your
strength. I grow weak, and you sap my strength from
me unknowingly as I become increasingly
tired and lose the will to live, drained by
the parasite within that will not let
me truly connect. Can't you see that I
am bound by the black sludge around my tongue
which coats my words and keeps me locked inside?
I fear that I cannot help you, for I
am nothing except the waiting -
waiting for my time to die.

I try so hard to change myself,
Yet it isn’t enough for you.

You force me and push me,
Yet when I bleed, it’s too much for you.

I can’t do what you wish of me,
Yet that’s not satisfaction enough for you.

I want you to stop,
*Is that too much to ask of you?

My body, my soul, my youth.
Young song pours from my skin
and weaves through the patterns
in my irises. I am beautiful
so she hates me. She curses me,
eating me up with her eyes,
eyes which are eating me alive.
She tears me apart
because she loves me,
I am too beautiful for her world.
She will dance in the winds
I make with my hands
and in the flowers which bloom
at my feet.
She will cry in the storms
I breathe
and the rivers
I sing.
She will know me and love me and run
away from me because my youth
is crawling somewhere,
somewhere where everything belongs
apart from her.

Somehow it's possible
to go from the pretty girl
to absolutely nothing
at the opening of a mirror.