Ghosts

It was the punctuation of your heart
That set you apart
From the others.
The brackets;
Open, not closed,
That separated us from everybody else.
I hid inside you.

Your name was branded on me,
A ghost tattoo decorating my skin.
You dangled the bait;
I bit.
Your scent a whisper on the lips of loss.
And then, and then.
You flee. 

Plagues

Frogs, lice, flies;
The plagues that crawled on my skin.
Forsaken, my cold bones
Twisted in a smog of unspoken desires.
A desire to hunt and be hunted,
To kill and be killed.

The curious vulgarity of hatred
Crawled on my skin, too,
And in my heart.
There were crows;
A murder.

Swimming Against the Tide

Swimming against the tide was what we did best;

The dark pools of our eyes proving too deep

For the rest of the world.

What was it that we reflected?

Was it art, poetry, love?

Or was it the hatred, thick in our hearts,

That oozed from our skin?

I buried you deep underground;

Tried to forget.

Yet; you beat inside my heart.

One two three four,

One two three four.

I can still hear you now.

Sylvia & Ted

The thread of her words seems unbreakable in your eyes.
And me?
Just incapable of prising you away
From her poisoned green eyed stare
That would not even dare to return the furtive glances
You thought I could not see.
Maybe in your mind you are Siamese twinned
(Like you and I in mine);
Her intoxicating presence lingering in our lives,
Despite the fact she is not
Supposed to be here,
And I am.

I am the one with the steadfast passion,
The fiery eyes
You would always never forget.
The one to refuse goodbyes.
But how precarious we stand,
How thin the line to walk
Between the shuffling
Murder of goodbye
And the trickling days of forever
That house the love in which we would have happily drowned.

Perhaps it is all those words
I breathe in daily
Where nothing is simple or beautiful
Without catastrophe to
Scar the days
Like the purple scars on my wrists
That sing like Roman royalty
To passers-by.
And you, with your demoniac
And tragic heroism,
Your famous secrets
That mean nobody can ever really reach you.

And so we begin again;
Begin that twisted waltz
We forever step together.
And hard as it is for me to admit…
Maybe it isn’t perfect anymore;
Maybe my books and yours
Have given us those ideals
We swore we’d never hold.
Perhaps the creeping doubts that steal my sleep
Are trying to teach me how to tear away,
How to run or flee or anything to escape this suffocating life.

The line we walk is thin,
The words we choose vital
To the depths of our seas
And lengths of our worlds.
I would rip your Shakespeare
Page by page
To tear her from our lives;
To break the monotony of misery
That you and she inflict.

Maybe I shall be immortal
And shall drench the world with the words
I can craft from nothing.
He shall be immortal too;
Cruel? A bully?
How will they cast him
In the mystery of the unknown future?
I shall be known as the poetess
Who dreamt of fire;
Drawn, moth-like,
Not to the flame itself
But to the aura of absolute darkness at the light’s edge.

Ice Cream Dreams

This is a poem I wrote after I broke up with someone I was with for two years.

You told me to forget;
But those soaring moments of euphoria
Are stuck in my mind.
And what did you expect?
Months that stretched behind us
Just trickling away
Like the water from the fountain we watched together.

At least my suspicions finally became tangible.
When I thought you were lost
Inside my arms
You were in fact lost in the arms
Of someone who was not me.
She returned to you,
Somewhere I could not reach you;
In your dreams.
Her face floating over mine
Until our memories slowly drifted away.
All of those months,
Those late night phone calls,
The days we retired to bed early
And revelled in the pure, joyous fact we could
Are now tainted by what you could not forget:
Her kisses, not mine.

So you ask me to forget
But those coffee-shop crosswords,
Those silent hotel nights
Are things I cannot shake out of my mind.
Licking fingers clean of
Those sticky ice cream dreams
We could have shared.

How to Disappear

I can still remember the shuddering, broken

Silence of those days

In which he took me hostage.

The long white lines

Had taught him how to disappear

And I had been left,

Floundered in

The burning, swirling acid of

Rejection,

Unable to keep up with the carousel

Of chemical highs

That made him dance,

His love coloured lips planting vodka flavoured kisses

On everyone that passed;

The carousel

That left his bones

Broken and charred.