i write sometimes

she’s just muddling through, clinging to grand ideas like Culture and Art whilst trying to spend less than 6 hours a day on her phone she likes to think about anything from love to nostalgia to anything that makes her Feel Deeply mostly though, she’s just a girl

[so1dialled9]

House martin

Deafening silence and loud crickets,

House martins chirp trill whistling for rest,

For a love that’s blessed,

The heartache of youth.

3am Oxford students library club,

House martins tweet chirruping as they cry sing try and I

Sit on a bench in sparkling light at 3am on a Thursday,

Initiated and made new and real and lonely in the mass of bodies.

The house martin sings dawn to me early

As the street lamps fade and the light

Rises on my benched body

Cold and stiff with no one.

There are people in the library today,

Someone flirted with me me today,

Someone just walked past me today

Why awake at 3am?

As illegal grass steps onto me

Why don’t I cry like the house martin in the not-Dawn

Silent and loud and quiet as a trumpet

Sound across the quarter?

[so1dialled9]

Poem 98:

I wonder how many more times

I will have to rebuilding myself

Into a new

Space.

At peace one moment,

The next a profound bouleversement

Right to the heart of my very being.

I know there’s something waiting.

But roots are slow to blossom.

These photos are full of pinholes, and the walls

are blue-tacked to nothing but memories.

All my worldly possessions in three suitcases,

Yet so much left behind.

Leaving and beginning;

This seems to be my current refrain.

People and places left, with thin

Slivers of promises;

We will speak again.

If only it were that simple.

My past roots are already slipping through

My fingers, revealing

Themselves only in a profound ache

Deep in my soul.

Somehow through the endless cycle

Of picking up and putting down

There must be a continuity,

A leading thread

That doesn’t smell of change, of

New laundry pods

and a different armchair.

I will measure my memories on my string of pearls,

And the trinkets on my nightstand.

I fear one day they will grow too many.

Change is relative.

I want to stay, please.

[so1dialled9]

Cathedral green

Old and new mix like paint,

Taupe and vibrant purple,

Rejecting and adapting,

I like to believe both at once,

And everyone is the better for it.

Sometimes I don’t know what I am saying.

Change is relative.

[so1dialled9]

Haiku

In my dreams I cry.

Not out pain, but of love.

The tears make me smile.

[so1dialled9]

GIRL WALKS HOME

One foot in front and

There are no words but a cat

Meowing through the shadows

Slick, soft and it’s under my hand, it’s in my arms like the

Moon, so close I can touch

But it’s not there

And I’m not drunk, not drunk yet just

Longing, dragging fingers over rough

Brick The wind floats me home

And I’m happy, so happy Even

though there’s a Man behind me

But I’m only ten steps away from

Force-fed live-streamed round the clock

Force-fed entertainment and the

Taste of my mother’s arms.

Too bad Men ruined the moon,

I reach it and share its commiseration through the window.

The man has passed.

Don’t you find it strange that

The only language we need is not

Known to us?

[so1dialled9]

As summer fades

As summer fades,

The change comes overnight,

Like the passing of a hand over the Earth;

Autumn whispers, with mulberry breath,

Sweet promises of cinnamon and wine,

Or a fire, flickering gold

On windows frosted against the cold light of morning.

Flecks of warmth in hearth and heart.

The sun, of course she tries,

Breathing life into the crisp winds’ soft silhouette.

Still she smiles, in vain, as

Soft, emerald clouds wrap her

In their caramel embrace.

They take her heat, and it is left to us in resurrection:

The warm glow of a winter duvet.

Even the leaves have changed their tune,

The soft rustle crisp, attentive; excited to

Drop.

She whispers to me;

Be still now. Rest.

Life lies in wait for spring, and yet

Still breathes kindness into every winter’s evening.

Buried beneath earth, beneath comforters and hope,

We wait.

I sit, outside in a blanket and bare legs,

And smile as the sun breathes

Her last blessing onto me.

I sit and watch the leaves turn.

[so1dialled9]

I hope she never grows up

The 9 year old

In her favorite white dress

Sits on the bus;

Lace frills and chocolate stained teeth

Melting a childish lipstick onto her smile

As she refuses to cross her legs.

The inner girl in me smiles back,

Scabs open on my knees

and a bleeding heart.

I remember long hair

dancing across an A-line

Hidden under a raincoat;

And a stomach that wasn’t there,

Just a patch of blue in the eye line

To my yellow wellies.

Last week I gifted

A dress to myself.

No frills, but a lace overlay

And a small bow on my sternum.

The yellow-wellied smile peeked

her shorn head through the onslaught of my teenage years.

It felt like healing.

[weltenwellen]

​Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955

[arylleth]

to love someone is firstly to confess: i'm prepared to be devastated by you.

[deadpoet-skull]

[elizabethsinclair]

love elizabeth s.

[mahoganyamore]

a masterpiece of tragedy

[girl-on-films]

[abernathyvalois]

I wanna go to museums and drink coffee extensively and read so many books and have lesbian sex is that too much to ask for

[so1dialled9]

Storm and Stress

Autumn, if it had meaning,

would come from the rich scent of

regret tinged with acceptance.

My mind is my own, but it

clings to hope like a virus;

one minute hiding, the next

bursting forth as a titan.

Who knew that stars could foretell

this form? I am growing to

my own design. Storm and Stress.

Reckless inhibition inhibits,

but i am chained

to the belief that it can free.

I chase, not perfection, but

aestheticism. You, my

love, are my inhibition.

Freedom is relative.

[so1dialled9]

On days like this I don’t feel like

The odd one out,

The sore English thumb in such continental prevalence.

Buoyed by beauty,

The people cease to become faceless and I am left

Wondering where they are going,

What their favourite colour is,

How their day is going.

I am lifted up in their image.

Do they know that their slow promenade

Is everything I want to be in life?

That I’m so grateful to be here, living their culture,

Their city, their Paris?

Beauty, buildings, people,

La manière de vivre.

It’s everything.

The breeze with that by chilling

reminds me of the hearth at

Home, the warm glow of winter.

The sun that winks behind a lamp post

And old lamp post,

With engravings and images worn deep into the warm iron

Since before I was born

I am so young

Compared to buildings that have stood

For centuries in delicate glory

Even the tallest post, the one

Bedazzled at night, keeping watch over it’s

People, even this hunk of metal is Beauty

Standing proud.

Rodin said “la beauté est partout”

I can see how one would think that,

Living here.

A last beam, a breath of warmth through the wind

Transformed from sharp to soft

A caress.

Welcome.

Thank you.

I am so grateful.

[so1dialled9]

Loving her was like drowning in honey.

Drowning and sputtering and trying to escape but the honey was so sweet and it was just there, so close and I could never say no, though I tried.

The honey was so sweet and rushed and full of sighs and almost too much.

An endless cycle of ebbs and flows.

[oscar-still-wildin]

Girl dinner but it’s just me swallowing Donna Tartt’s The Secret History whole