[moveonmoveon]

a year to move on

in the aftermath I wrote ‘this year was a mark'

of training myself to forget the night we ran away from friends So we could drunkenly stagger up stair wells and pause to kiss through gasps of breath. I promised myself next time I'd quit But always surrendered  to feel fingers lock in mine again You fell asleep singing high pitched Christmas songs and i wished I could change the frequency because i appear to be tuned in to love,  that was always going to leave.

a year

of training the chemicals in my brain to not still taste you in intoxication training my laugh to be mine again and stop carrying yours within it my face to forget the weight of yours against it heavy with sleep with heat teaching my bed to forget your imprint where you'd drunkenly read Hemmingway train my eyes to stop searching for headlights pulling on to my driveway

a year

to forget the days we spent in hibernation pressing ice packs to shared skin when you finally left it was in torrential rain but you soon came back to me again, to say 'don't worry, I've got you’ in thunderstorms like i wasn't going to fall in love had Othello on your bed stand, like i wasn’t going to fall in love. traced constellations with your hands and i mistook it all for love.

a year

to let go of my best friend (the hardest part) who followed me drunk into freezing nights. to lie on abandoned hills in the dark Who'd bring me books that he'd tie up in string. Who I knew once had loved me, but I left suffering

'this year was a mark' Now to look back, i can see; the truth is i moulded you into someone who would hurt me.

[moveonmoveon]

hum (my government approved walk of the day)

in the weight of the unknown healing can hide

in a sinking sun. it's golden light, 

a blush of pink soothing heavy skies   slow grieving limbs sense the hum of spring,   in letting light in,  you'll let go of darker things. a chest might beat restless,  in want, in need, but take this gift from the earth; permission to breathe.

[youcandonowronginmyeyes]

Poetry very literally on point. (I slept through national poetry day) (i literally am missing one of my ribs)

[moveonmoveon]

burn out

the world is a restless, swarming of things. a united dragging of tired heavy limbs a chest of cosmic matter that moves with the rise and the fall of each waste of breath the aimlessness behind it all. i want the quiet hum, of nothing. the vibration of the void, boundless and glowing. to dissipate the burden of how i might be seen to forget the discontentment you can carry in a screen to have a thought, thats just a thought to remember what it means to just be in the world for a while.

[moveonmoveon]

moonflower

our mornings are soft soft soft and we laugh at my hair, always matted wild from the heat of you

the truth is you're the only boy my body has tried to fuse itself to fuse to the shadows your bones make the angles in your shape when they're intertwined with mine with need a pull like the moon flustred, frustrated i’m never quite in the room i am removed from reality, from sanity when you use the words you do and because of them, in honest truth i could learn to love my body (when its with your body)

[moveonmoveon]

Ogle

Ogle taught me how to lure spiders out of spiderwebs. We’d analyse constellations as he chain smoked cigarettes. He raced vintage motorbikes now my sister races too, I still remember the way we'd laugh as he stretched out his tattoos. He dressed up as a bear once to pick us up from school and together we'd fill the dancefloor of any empty room. His overflowing garage to me, was filled with treasure. Inside it he'd make jewellery for us out of burning metal There was a vibration in the universe the last time we said goodbye, no possible way I could have known but I inexplicably started to cry. The church didn’t have enough seats for how many people showed up, it wasn't until I saw the coffin that i started to well up. Ogle taught me how to lure spiders out of spiderwebs. we’d analyse constellations, as you chain smoked cigarettes. Now whenever the sky is black enough for the stars to glitter through, the one that stands out from the rest, that's the one i know is you.

[moveonmoveon]

hemlock

With hot nostalgic mouths, we planted seedlings. The thing i called suffocation was budding spinose teeth; that laced red muscle chambers like a tainted purple bruise, the taste in every acid kiss should tell you how they bloomed. Tell the risk in how I nurtured heedful hemlock as it grew, I cough up blood stained petals, and present them proudly to you. Spear the girl i was with garlands, drown her fear in freckled pools, kiss each eyelash under the water, i am waiting to be consumed, i am waiting. 

[moveonmoveon]

Carve.

If love is about being able to forgive

then I thank the universe for the shape it carved me in to allow me to fit inside that space

where your imperfect body makes me ache I could love you so much it makes me afraid

makes me crave soft fingers over pink ribbon scars

and hot copper mouths to leave their own marks

let you cut again but this time i beg you

make sure you carve me into somebody new.

[moveonmoveon]

immolation

in ink we catch sparks in the end of our fingertips.

find the fuse hidden behind your tongue grind bones together set them to burn.

i am dust. reality will not bend to us and love is just too plain a word.

we are some fragile aching mythic thing that time will not contain.

cruel, how well i fit into that space beside your rib-cage cruel, how I could love you until we both decayed

you are afraid of salt skin that scrapes in sacred light

you suffocate in what it all could have been if we’d tried

burned out flames should never be allowed to reignite

but you plant landmines in my skin when you dig your fingers in.

feel them brand soft hummingbird nerves with electricity. trip ignition with every flicker of memory.

in my head you beg please please please again and now that word carries a pulse.

and with each new wave new surrender to it’s push

i set fire to my own self preservation.

[moveonmoveon]

Wallpaper

There is hunger inside of me. Flaws carved into my body, where you ought to be. I see you and I taste salt. You’re my walking, breathing, bleeding heart. My absentee distraction from the routine of sanity. Self loathing was always going to be mandatory.

If time is a flat circle, you spiked it with indifference, I still push myself just to be in your presence. I catch myself sulking when you aren’t there to manipulate all my facial expressions. You walk into a room demanding everyone’s favour,

and in comparison I am just wallpaper.

Commit hours and hours and word counts a day and i won’t have left a single mark, I’ll still be easy to discard. Not worth another word after a full stop, not even worth the effort to move vocal chords.   I cannot belong to a nurturing love, I am disposable by nature. Not worth one second of the hot breath behind every kiss or conversation. I refuse to ever belong to happiness, I promise to twist, and contort myself out of it.

You found someone new, immune, to your intimidation;

and in comparison: I am just wallpaper.

[moveonmoveon]

Kepler

Falling in love wasn’t linear. It came in swells, in waves, that could never make time work for us, each time one fell in love, the others orbit changed.

We were never written in fate; we were scrawled, in rooms imbued in dark, perfectly absorbed in condemned gravity, that tangled our bodies so heavy with sleep, I can still feel the weight on me. It lives in blood cells, it’s cosmically infused. Oh the chaos I’d have lived in just to keep you.

But a star that burns too bright, insists on it’s own catastrophic destruction. Ill fated, merciless stellar collision. the push and pull of love caused us both to spiral inward, and in the words we left unsaid we ripped whole worlds we’d built to pieces.

In destruction’s wake; I look back at the deep sky we left scarred, Ophiuchus renamed to ‘fate’s graveyard’ it says: ‘my atoms loved your atoms’ and each year that passes, it fades, into a glow of dying embers, a faint and spectral spark, only to be seen by those who look hard enough into the dark.

[moveonmoveon]

/what rhymes with rust?/

I can’t breathe from the red wine resting on my chest. Thought it started to die, then re-injected it. A sharp stab into the mundane; a voice, with a brand new edge. In warm mornings of restless contorting, i carve shapes in the spaces you’d be, where I cant stop craving the humming, of our own high pitched frequencies. Why not confess again, just what you’d do to me.

Or if we’re skipping into jagged confessions,  tell this to me instead: Is the girl that you chose over me, ever laid next to you in bed,   when you’re waiting up at night just so that we can speak? In secret realms, a universe;  composed out of the tension of unspoken words.

Where we insist on the resurrection of versions of us we lay down to die, that we surrendered, albeit unwilling;  to the calm suffocation of time. and now through imprudent dissection; they stagger again, alive. In each new heave of staggered breath: old aches, old blood; stain perception red. and that’s the rust that’s on my chest.

If I could live there in that space, inside the waves of words that we create, I’d choose it over sanity. Never quite awake enough, to absorb the reality; of past and present as they intertwine, as they move and they twist, over gradients left long behind, the marks that we make; when we linger too long. 

Maybe you follow me into the feeling, and like me, just close your eyes. Not wanting a body to carry the weight of decisions that will lead to sacrifice. Abandon that burden,  in a dark room behind a screen, two minds too tired from lack of sleep that wont stop spiraling,

/delirious thinking of souls intertwined/ /the guilt it keeps me awake at night/

[moveonmoveon]

neon

I had brand new neon scars to nurse and a brick sewn into my chest when you left your own silent mark on me. so cutting, that it stole all of the attention, from worthy aching limbs. call my body an oxymoron. my head; nothing but grateful that we met my heart; so imbued with the loss of you- that it appears to be living in that overwhelming absence.

Somehow you were the beginning of hurt, yet at the same time, the end. I just wish you’d really meant it when you said you wanted to be friends.

[moveonmoveon]

The Biology of Drowning

Yeah I see you, move in the same ways as me I sit and watch in secrecy afraid too, of the pull between us, i dont miss anything. a soul without a body swims in highs that pierce the most perfect 3 letter word, i will ever hear triggers waves in me. (and i need to quit before they pull me under) but i’ve heard that drowning is a good way to go asphyxia’s warm, hypoxia: slow, which version of you showed up tonight? yeah I saw you, yeah I know that we’re both haunted by the weight of the things we can’t let go by this; maybe we spent our time growing into two souls that should have fit but never did. and thats it.

[moveonmoveon]

Push

shaking legs and illuminous limbs adjusting to life with a concrete masonry unit sewn into your chest. trying to remember that softer world poem about broken bones, and broken hearts, hurting well. it’s world poetry day so i dug out my favourite. my favourite came wrapped in a map i found words in it i underlined a year ago in her red pen and i could still feel them lingering like they never left I’m still feeling that light of new people and platonic love. blissful and easy pins and needles in everything acceptance in girls like you, like us. all trying, moving forward, together. pushing. I’ve changed because they’re all in me now, the fibre of me. I’m actually happy (oh god) i want to absorb their light and brilliance, feel our insecurities fuse together because they’re the same. (identically the same) (isn’t that beautiful.) I stopped carrying it. I stopped carrying you. I wonder if this ache has been put there to make me remember the sickness i was drowning in maybe they cut it out its lifted. i kissed a boy just for the fun of it and it didn’t weigh on me. I kissed a boy with the same longing for someone else us both trying to stagger on like they weren’t physically weighing in our heads, in our heavy bodies maybe for a time, we cancelled it out. i felt the push i felt the push maybe you started all of this good. i think you’re still in my head because i’m swimming in rejection out of habit but i’m not committed to it this time. how could i be mad? at beautiful boys i had no chance of figuring out making me want to get taxis to their houses at 2am just for the story. when i feel it starting to settle on my chest i will push it off i will watch it scatter maybe i didn’t matter maybe its completely irrelevant here.

i feel the push give in to the waves hard crashes of everything i felt the push I felt the push, thank you if somehow down the line we ever become close, I’ll tell you.

[moveonmoveon]

dissipate

siamese dream the words to mayonaise ‘we’ll try and ease the pain…. … but somehow we’ll feel the same‘ clarity in the words: ‘he’s just not thinking about it’ felt my brain slot back into sanity from just speaking to my soul mates for an hour i miss them so much im going to get weird about it i’m thinking about getting a tattoo of mountain peaks capture our adrenaline, in ink that beautiful girl i have a crush on just posted lyrics that i can’t stop thinking about ‘prone to wander, lord i feel it here’s my heart, lord, take and seal it’ a very coincidental vibration in the universe. he changed his hair keeps talking about Polly Jean oh god he’s so pretty, he’s all eyelashes and long limbs I leave ‘dissipate’ in the search bar  keep the definition to hand for when I need to put words to how i feel when he’s around.

stop flashing your scars to boys on the internet awkward as fuck is my natural aesthetic I remember listening to cassettes in his pink car. on route to scenes on cliff edges that we’d both have a hard time letting go off. I’m falling asleep in ink stained sheets again. 

Ah so there’s a bit of an edge to that Nico song, now.

[moveonmoveon]

what followed

there’s a joke in this somewhere one blunt sharp sentence. you could feel the lack of empathy in it, the hope there wouldn’t be a response. the inconvenience;

and i felt the most elated relief I’ve felt in over a month. I told everyone around me, giddy. almost shouting I JUST HAD A LIFE EXPERIENCE at cute men in the microwave queue in the kitchen. life feels like a self deprecating rom-com again and God is that a glorious fit for me.

I found a new band I liked that he’d probably call boring and my body stopped vibrating with anxiety when I told it to listen to the music I didn’t keep having to take breaks in half hour slots because I couldn’t bare the day to keep moving on.

I messaged my friends and everyone of them made my heart swell I made them laugh. God it feels good to click with other human beings. I blasted arcade fire on the walk home in the cold smiling and ran into a sprint into the dark I slipped but still didn’t stop I looked up at the sky and said, I feel you in this. I prayed for clarity and I got it in a 12 hour slot. i laughed at why I was trying to fool myself so hard (i didn’t realise that when I joked with friends that you weren’t into me I was secretly hoping you weren’t because at least we’d have that in common)

Now i can feel that light inside of me as i talk to other humans about things i really love and feel them love them too without you holding my hand out of frame. physically not fitting into that place where body’s are supposed to fit. I met a guy at a party to run down dark alleyways with  and clicked with him in 30 seconds more than we ever did and all i said to him was my twitter handle.

this is all it ever was about: finally getting through a day without saying his name 98 times. and not noticing every minute I didn’t. not being in love anymore for the first time in over a year. 

I want to love with every ounce of myself. No more denial or grooming for anyone else. No more arguments with my body.   No one to wonder about.

alone and in that free.