So much darkness

It’s undulating form

Swallows me back, to the very pit of its belly

Yours is a tight bodice

Cinching in at my lungs

And forcing me in this recumbent position

And it seems like we’re all just here to drink down merriment and swallow breaths back

To dissipate the fear of this darkness in your belly

I grapple with the whispers

Their sibilant selves wrapping around tightly around my throat

I will them to on, to expedite my demise

So the rest can carry on without the radio interference

Squeeze

Squeeze

So you can have your say

And peace can be bestowed

And sleep can be found

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Oh. Yes.

Avoidance

I love your name. Tastes

So good

To drink you back and

Drown

Inside, behind the curtains. And I

Let their weight

Take mine

From under my feet

Skitter,

Scatter,

Letters just rain

Down

Swirling in on themselves to form

A semi-circle

You

Make my breath

Stop. You

Make it

Hard to breathe

With all this dust in here. A

Thick cloak of invisibility. She shines

Only at night

Piano girl

Dark and hollow,

She presses keys

Up and down to fill the spaces

between the pauses

Reverb fills her lungs

and she gasps,

A second to jump outside of the skin

choking her in slow-motion,

And another

To fix her shadow

permanently beside her

I was only trying

to let you

see

The trail I dropped behind

me

Nuts and seeds

to nourish you

On your journey over here

But she’s all that I got

Treble clefts and staccato notes

tighten around my neck

To numb the absence of you

I come to,

To find my fingers laces around her knuckles,

My lips to her ears, breathing breaths

to collect and amass, so as to sink below

so she could rise up

And so I could

continue disappearing

Liquid lozenges

Liquid lozenges

Cracking off of my teeth

Her blood

Just oozing out between the cracks

She swirls around my lip,

A slow, deliberate

Movement of two worlds

I suck the air in

And with it

Splatters from her innards

It’s all I can do

To not recoil at its form,

Lodged in my throat

And the bits

Scurrying to fill my lungs

Broken Glass

No I won’t

Hear your words

They slide out of your mouth

And right into the palms of your hands

You offer them up

For me to chew and swallow

I don’t want their pleasing aroma

To trick me into indulging in the mirage of their existence

I scoop of shreds of broken glass

From alleyways and abandoned buildings,

The dirt they lie in a secondary bonus

We crush them between our teeth

Grinding their saltiness into my blood

Until we grind them into a fine powder

Half she takes, and I take mine

Together we scrub my face raw

Your words have soiled my insides

And I need to be cleansed

Kalopsia

Your form lingers on my teeth

Arms lazily stretched out,

A force

With an unapologetic skin

That sticks thick and opaque

You casually drop in as you please

And I scramble at your feet, tripping over the words I set in concrete not an hour before

You came in your chariot, dear Kalopsia

And I fell hard and I fell clean

As my eyes were a-blinded by the way you wrapped yourself around me

Tapping out Freedom

Sadness, she drip drops

On to the ledge I stand on

She runs off uninhibited,

Not even a flicker of embarrassment at the nakedness she wears,

Bright and brazenly

Oh my tongue, how it salivates

At the nakedness of her freedom

And I reach closer

To try to catch just one of her drops

But it’s a race I’ve not prepared for

She outruns me every time

No matter how quickly I catch her drops,

I’m still stuck behind the rock I crouch behind

And the ledge where freedom beckons me

I want her to quench the thirst that sits inside, rock-hard

But she is unforgiving,

Lapping up all my amber prayers

Without a second to rethink my offering

And I just clutch a single flame

Between the palms of my hands

Its amber -coloured self so mesmerizing

As it blackens my flesh

A last ditch homage to you,

Who I want so much

To just notice me

So my sacrifice for you

Would be worth the space I take up

Shelves

Here you go,

The shelves are up

It’s up to you to stack yourselves up on top of them, it’s not on me anymore

It was always a thankless job anyway

But you, you don’t disperse and scatter without me there shouldering you, like I had imagined you would

Without missing a beat, you tie knots and make chains to pull and push

Until each and everyone is up, neatly stacked

Self-satisfied smiles burst out across your horizon

A brightness begins to light up over you

Sparking applause from within your smug selves, partnering itself alongside back-slapping and whoops of joy and glee

I wish I could say

I felt light to see your bouncing smiles

But instead

Rocks began to grow inside

And weighed down the muscles of my own mouth

No joy able to shine out

And the loneliness of being forgotten just weighed me to the spot

I knew you remembered me

But you’d forgotten so easily

How you were never supposed to hurt me this way

And that if you ever did, you weren’t supposed to ever forget

Such an unforgivable deed

But you’ve both forgotten and also you’re quite content

I want to take my shelves down and let you drop right down

And let your bodies hit concrete

Like my heart has

I want you to hurt

From being smashed open

And in no way possible

Being able to be put back to whole

But as That desire grows alongside my rocks

I feel more heavy and sad

To feel the antithesis

Of your being

And loneliness is wedged between me and these rocks inside

Enjoy your view from up there

I’ll just keep sipping this poison

That I had laid out for you originally

I’m getting more and more used to the taste

Cacti

Concrete walls lick me once-over

Grey and impersonal,

It’s just a perfunctory gesture

And it’s here that I hang,

Upside down

with nowhere to go

But back up from where I came

Cacti, they spring out from the walls,

A prickly invasion

Designed to throw me off

And yet I grit my teeth

And my fingers dig to find grooves and spaces so I can keep this momentum of movement

Because even as my skin is pricked and punctured,

blood pitter-patters down all over my consciousness,

I still must keep moving

Lest I stay here

Where all the blood would rush to my head,

The pressure of which would cause it and whole head to burst open

And rain down on unsuspecting pedestrians below us

No, that would be most uncouth

So let us continue, discomfort and all.

Brewing. Threading.

She’s a kind of acid

And I roll her between my fingers

To throw a lump on my eye

It catches and it sticks,

Hungrily eating up the trail of flesh that circles there

Trailing a skip and a jump of red sores behind her steps

She strips off, uninhibited

Her flesh shredding off in strips, easy flow

As she walks on wooden floors

That begin and end within my chest and it’s deep bottomed ocean

We thought she couldn’t reach us down here

But her appetite, it’s always prevailed

And she begins her second feast of the day

As the light from her watering saliva gleams and glistens

Trailing lazily on my tongue

I lie on the seabed,

Neither condoning nor condemning of her whole acidic self ,

But Just here,

Threading water

For all that it’s worth