Pillow Book Poetry

pillow book noun A literary collection of loosely connected personal observations. Most of my poetry is best read aloud.

[lyzbrown]

I can't tell you that I love you

I can't tell you that I love you so I reply to all your messages within seconds no matter how long you've left me on read

I can't tell you that I love you so I buy you drugs and tell you I was getting some for me anyway and never give you the dealer's number so it's always me you need to call I can't tell you that I love you so I whisper it aloud into the universe when I'm alone like a prayer and hope the force of my conviction permeates your heart despite the distance between us I can't tell you that I love you so I tell anyone else who will listen until they're sick of the sound of me I'm sure my friends would pay to never hear me say your name again and yet I can't tell you that I love you so I just keep my calendar clear in case you have the time to see me and no, I know this isn't healthy I just don't know how to let go of this beautiful love story that was over before it even really got to begin I can't tell you that I love you so I'll be your friend, I guess For once in my life try to settle for less than what my soul truly craves, be brave and strong and get along and try not to hope you'll come back to me like a tide pulled by the sea, try not to break my own heart over and over each time I see your face.

I can't tell you that I love you but I'm sure that you know. You're not stupid, and I'm not discreet and maybe this story will forever be incomplete and maybe in my mind I will spend the rest of my life rewriting it and bringing our plotlines back together in some perfect resolution because for me, the only solution to this puzzle of missing pieces in my heart is your hand in mine with the sunshine on our skin.

I can't tell you that I love you so I drive across town in rush hour traffic to pick up plants for your garden and try to keep them alive until we meet again and hope you will remember me every time you look at them, even when I am gone, and hope that something bigger and longer lasting grows from them than grew from our flash-in-the-pan romance and I know that you'll be happy. Maybe I will too, but I just know it was never like this, not with anyone else. I can't tell you that I love you but maybe someday I'll tell you that.

[lyzbrown]

hey are you free for the rest of your life? i think that will be enough time to touch all four corners of the map, warm your hands against arctic cold, huddle like penguins in antarctic snow, bathe in golden eastern sun and chase the dawn across the west. i don't want you all to myself i just want more in a way i didn't think i would, or at least i tried not to.

i've watched the sun across your face through three full turns of the seasons now and i still think spring is my favourite, your eyes as green as the grass we laid on the day we met, your skin warm the first time your hand brushed against my arm. i like you best late at night, when you're not trying so hard to be whatever it is you think you have to be, when you are just with me and that's it.

i'd want you in opulence, in luxury, in unrivalled decadence, and i'd spend my last quid on a coffee so you could warm yourself from the cold. i'd recite you shakespeare in between kisses in the early hours and cackle with you at stupid memes at the bus stop. i want to share every beginning and ending with you. i want to sit under sunsets with you, and make love until the sun rises again, i want to tan under the summer sun against your warm skin and hold your hand in darkened winter streets. i want to fill your birthday cake with more and more candles each year and laugh at you struggling to blow them all out. every time i blow out candles i'll wish for more of you.

each tomorrow is a gift i'd like to open with you, kiss you as we unwrap each hour of our lives together. for you have awakened within me something i thought was long dead, when we sizzled together under the stage lights and you reminded me what it feels like to be really truly alive. if this is living then let me live each season and each sensation alongside you. you gave me back to myself so let me share myself with you.

[lyzbrown]

I looked up at you under the stage lights in a sold-out theatre, but the electricity that sizzled between us was no improbable fiction. You held my hand, fingers interlaced, like a lover, not an actor, and we bounced off each other with the kind of chemistry you can't fake or fight. And when we took a bow and you looked at me in a way that was not acting not even method acting and I felt like I'd been hit by a train, like two and a half years of frightened, repressed emotion hit me at once like a tidal wave like I could never ever again pretend to not be madly in love with you, my acting skills don't extend so far. But why would you believe me? Why would you think this sudden rush was sincere and real when I hid from you (and the world) for so long? Why would you meet me where I am when I disguised it from you for so long? Why would you be in love with me when I never showed you I could deserve it?

[lyzbrown]

A Sleepless Night

Sleepless, though I know that sleeping makes the hours pass until I can touch you again. Every hour not spent contemplating the exact shade of green in your eyes seems a careless waste. How could I sleep when there are still people in this world unaware of the softness of your lips and the fire that burns along my skin when you draw your fingers across it? It would be negligent not to take an inventory of your beauty with every breath I draw in and sigh out your name each time I exhale. What rest can there be before I am drunk on your voice once again, lovingly disassembled in your arms?

[lyzbrown]

growing

never abandon hope even if the pain shakes you to your core. perseverance is the seed ready to be cultivated into the fruit you’re waiting for.

[lyzbrown]

memory

a memory should be nothing, for you cannot see it, touch it, or hear it, but it’s something enough that you cannot destroy it, even if you try to drown it in the bottle or force it out with smoke or bleed it from your veins, intangible and yet indestructible.

[lyzbrown]

and while others change from one day to the next as it suits them, you remain the unique face of your soul.

[lyzbrown]

disarray

the fact is, you sent my heart into disarray. it happened somewhat by chance. i didn’t foresee meeting you and you didn’t foresee falling in love. but it happened. we found each other and then devoured each other. one evening, our eyes decided to enchant each other and they haven’t moved since.

[lyzbrown]

hello again

and the sky in your eyes, mysterious and infinite, becomes more familiar, welcomed in by the presence of my listening soul.

[lyzbrown]

The strange serenity in falling out of love

I will fill the plate that is my life so that I won’t even notice that all you give me is breadcrumbs, and I will feast on it, on everything that is not you.

I have been starving for too long, the void inside me all-consuming. No more. No more. Now the emptiness is filling, calm, and safe, the cavern within me is now a lake, still, smooth, a perfect mirror from which every mistake I’ve made stares back at me, beautiful and wrong, like you, beautiful and wrong for me, and maybe someday someone will pour oil across my smooth surface and set me alight again, but it is high time I came to terms with the fact that you stopped fanning our fire long ago and that trying to rekindle it alone is as lonely as it is pointless.

You say I seem distant, because I have stopped pouring my lake endlessly into your black hole. If you wanted me to want you, why didn’t you act like it? If you wanted me to love you, why did you stop trying?

[lyzbrown]

Tumour

I wish that I could excise the need for love from me like a tumour all it does is make me sick with disappointment and heartbreak and your radiation is just a poison and your chemicals aren’t worth the side effects and I wish I weren’t so addicted, wish I was a different person who wants different things and doesn’t need the things that I need. I wish I could cut you out of me and it would just leave a hollow hole, not a raw gaping wound. I am bleeding anyway I wish I could stop you from bleeding me dry.

[lyzbrown]

i’d do it all again

i hope what you’re searching for will make you happy in a way i couldn’t i hope it will satisfy that thirst in a way i never could.

my heart broken again, more a crater or a bombed-out building than an open door. you got what you came for.

and i’m weary for a home, for someone to love me more than pride or shame more than the pain from the push and pull, the tidal waves that rip through my brain lord knows i don’t do anything by halves.

and i’m longing to no longer have any sadness to outrun, or at least a sadness that isn’t quite so crushing. life is terrifying, but with you it felt less so. with you it felt less so.

the last time i saw you when we got out the defibrillators and tried to resuscitate our love i was so shell-shocked by how cold and dead it felt that i couldn’t even cry as this precious thing withered away in my arms and dissolved into darkness like a night bus pulling away.

give me back that piece of my heart, please. in any case, you never really wanted it. i need it because my head was lost so long ago, melted like wax like a candle burnt to a soft malleable mess unique and oddly beautiful in its deformity.

and maybe when i return to this city when time has passed and seasons changed it won’t taste like your wine-drunk lips in the dark and i won’t see us kissing in the rain at midnight. maybe it won’t matter anymore. maybe it will just be an interlude, a madness we indulged in. maybe i will have stopped thinking about how i’d do it all again.

[lyzbrown]

looking for me

we don’t say it but we both know you’re looking for me in the taste of her mouth in the noises she makes in the things she lets you do to her

tell me does she turn the same shade of blue does your name sound the same on her tongue does her body contort like mine does she know how to struggle against you does she know just how much of a fight you like

you can keep looking but you won’t find eyes like mine anywhere else.

[lyzbrown]

Moments I would live again if I could

Standing on my grandad’s shoes while he held my hands and we danced Sitting in a shopping trolley while my friends pushed me down the street Making rainbow pancakes, both covered in flour Sledging down the golf course and pelting snowballs Tuxedo junction, trombone slide in my face Falling asleep on my best friend’s shoulder in front of a film Long walk on the beach with the dogs, sand between my toes First clandestine kiss which was the beginning of the downfall Curtain up, under the stage in the lights The bandleader grabbing me by the arm and hauling me up onto the tour bus Making love on the beach in the dark with the most sublime mistake I have ever met Sitting by the duck pond and longing to reach out to him The strongest man I know holding me so tight in his arms that I forgot what fear was Long tattooed legs across my lap, the leopard print dress, her voice, her laugh Drunk, low murmured American voice - I love you - the canal sighing beneath us The first night, August heat, scalding kisses New Year’s Eve, your eyes glittering when you told me you loved me and everything that had been so blurry and nebulous suddenly clicked into focus like a kaleidoscope.

[lyzbrown]

what a waste i am

and isn’t kind of wasteful and sad that a woman with as many talents as i is better at falling hopelessly in love than at anything else she knows

[lyzbrown]

all that remains

one of the hardest things i had to learn is that you can’t love someone into being good for you, or good to themselves. you can’t make the pieces of the jigsaw fit if the other person keeps blindly knocking over the table, and if you set yourself on fire to keep them warm, all you end up with is two piles of ashes.

[lyzbrown]

if i could tell my younger self anything

if i could tell my younger self anything, i would tell her that the size on your clothes’ tags matters to no one. i’d tell her that once she stops caring what everyone else thinks, they will stop offering their opinions. i’d tell her that if she fakes confidence long enough, it stops becoming an act. i’d show her how to walk into a room like she owns it, like the men do, i’d tell her that no one can tell her she doesn’t belong if she places down roots in doc marten boots. i’d tell her that the rules are made up, that she can do literally whatever she wants, people will offer their unwanted opinions until she learns to shove them back down their throats, then they will judge silently, then they will learn to see that she is happy and not care. i’d tell her that fear is her friend, that if it feels wrong, it is, that her instincts are her best armour and truest allies, that listening to them is the biggest kindness she can do herself. i’d tell her that no one will be surprised when she admits she likes girls, and in a few years, people will be more surprised when she says she likes boys. i’d tell her that love isn’t divisible, that the people who would tell you otherwise are just trying to sell you their unhappiness. i’d tell her that no one ever fucking notices if you don’t shave your legs. i’d tell her that in a few years time, she’d regret the years she wasted trying to fit in. i’d tell her to embrace her weird and buy those ridiculous shoes. i’d tell her to kiss that fucking boy, already, when they’re both single and calm and not while freewheeling through breakups and wreckage and grief. i’d tell her to answer the fucking phone when her grandad calls, every time. i’d tell her not to hyperextend her joints, even to freak people out, she’ll pay for it in a few years. i’d tell her that she’d work it out with her family and they’d be close. i’d tell her that those pink leggings are fucking atrocious and belong in the bin. i’d tell her not to wear her hair up unless she wants to. i’d tell her that any man who offers his unsolicited opinion on how she looks, speaks, or acts, deserves nothing but derision and a punch in the throat. i’d tell her that the only thing better than a frenchman in bed is two of them. i’d tell her that no one cares that she still sleeps with a teddy, you get your small comforts where you can in this life. i’d tell her not to confuse brutal honesty with cruelty. i’d tell her that good things come in threes, but so do bad things, i’d tell her that any man who throws things or punches walls when angry is just making sure she knows just how much he wishes he could hit her and get away with it, i’d tell her that relationships aren’t projects, and the only person worth developing is herself, no one will do it for her, she shouldn’t do it for anyone else. most importantly, i’d tell her that it’s not enough to be in love, that she can’t save that boy from himself, that she can’t fix the broken part of the next boy, for she didn’t break it, that sometimes leaving someone is the only way she can love herself, even if leaving leaves a hole in her soul. i’d tell her that when the chips are down, the only person she has is herself, that she’s stuck with herself forever, and when she learns to be okay with that, it will only get better. i’d tell her that the men who will tell her she is broken have a vested interest in keeping her self esteem low. i’d tell her that needing the medication doesn’t make her a failure, even if she needs it for the rest of her life. i’d tell her to be present, to be there in the moments that matter, to remember each caress of the mediterranean waves, savour each kiss, relish every laugh, squeeze every hand tight in between her fingers, i’d tell her to love with wild abandon, not that she’s ever needed any encouragement with that. i’d tell her that she would only ever regret the things she didn’t do, to kiss that girl, to take that job, to go to that party and stay out too late, to seize every moment of life with both hands and squeeze it, for it’s just a fragile flame that can be extinguished any second, and i’d tell her that it will be okay, that if she’s true to herself it will be okay, in the end.