I unhook my knuckles first,

Stiff with years of bone-splintering

Almosts,

Tendons snapping back at me

Like traps finally sprung loose.

I’ve been holding my breath ever since

I realised wishing costs less

Than doing.

Lungs compressed into two closed fists;

Air that doesn’t know where to go.

Now I peel my hands open,

Skin coming off with the motion,

The wound splitting down the middle but

Breathing in the open air.

Scar tissue of maybes

Splits down the center,

And something new and stupid and

Alive

Crawls out anyway.

I stop waiting for the coin to land,

Stop reading my palms for a verdict,

(They were never truly

Going to write themselves.)

The luck must be bitten,

Instead. Feel it lodge sideways,

A wishbone in my throat.

Feel it crack

My teeth like something I finally

Choose to chew on.

We were never built

To stay so stiff.

A body built to bleed.

To hobble on half-formed thoughts,

Stomach churning,

Teeth grinding

The whole way there.

Grinning bloody red gums,

At everything it survives

Under amber light of July,

We drink the nectar

Of what’s unsaid,

Petals bruising in the heat.

Your touch hums

Like cicadas in the evening air.

Teeth grazing the edge of exhale,

We gnaw on the marrow of longing.

Roses scar deeper

Beneath the sun’s last breath.

Tongues flutter like leaves in restless wind;

Skin splits under the surface;

Raw with the

Ache of becoming.

Roots burrow into parched earth,

Roots knotted in drought.

Hearts fracturing in the dust of late summer,

Hearts pulsing like sap, thick and slow.

Blood a silent river,

Coursing the cracks of want.

We bloom as one: less flesh, more soil.

Unkempt in our own craving.

Each sip of dusk a tender communion,

Each beat a nudge that we are

Both thorn and petal,

Softness cloaked in sharpness:

Beauty biting the bitter.

Our souls entwined in the slow burn

Of something wordless,

Yet known.

We spill into the night,

A dark bloom spreading,

Veins lit by the quiet burn of what

We cannot grasp.

Her lips have a way:

Of inviting religious devotion,

Of begging me to fall to my knees

In prayer,

To stare up into the dark eyes

Of a contemptuous God.

I swear, I’m not religious

But for her sin I consume.

Let her feed me bread of her flesh

And gulp wine from her lips.

I request that she submerge me

In her deadly fate – exchange for a

Moment

To revel beneath her

Glory.

Her twisted grin invites –

Enchants – the last morsel of my soul.

And I beg,

I beg for redemption.

Out of the fourteen billion years it took for carbon to learn how to be a person, out of the hundred billion galaxies doing absolutely nothing on purpose, you were born on a Tuesday, or a Thursday, in a hospital I’d never heard of, on the other side of a world that didn’t need either of us to happen.

And it happened anyway.

From every flight that could have been delayed but wasn’t, to every job we didn’t take, every street we almost lived on instead, every version of that day where we walk right past each other, headphones in, not looking up - somehow, in this one, we both looked up.

I think about the endless empty spaces. How most of the universe is exactly that - distance, and more distance, and the dark between the stars that are themselves just distance, holding onto light with both arms. And how in all of that emptiness, there is this: your voice, learned by heart. A name I didn’t know before that now I’d run into traffic for without a second thought.

Perhaps we are scattered across oceans, time zones, across small tragedies of different area codes - you in one kitchen and me in another, yet both of us under the same indifferent moon arriving at different hours. But the universe already proved it can close impossible distances once. I’m not afraid of it doing something smaller, for even just an evening that we ever had to be anywhere else.

Out of every detail that had to fall into place, to happen exactly the way it happened. The failed friendships, the wrong turns, the events we almost didn’t go to, the friend of a friend of a friend…out of all that astonishing machinery built up to put two people in the same room for that one ordinary Tuesday.

Fourteen billion years, a hundred billion galaxies, and what it eventually built was small enough to fit in a voice I’d know in a crowded room, in the particular song of your laugh coming through a phone speaker. From underwater, or through the next room, or in the warmth of your shoulder; always, unmistakably, you.

This way to Eden.

I carved the arrows myself,

With fingernail and knuckle,

Into bark, brick lanes, into

The meat of my own forearm.

This way, so you’d have something

To follow aside from my voice

Giving up halfway there.

I don’t even know how I knew,

I didn’t. Just kept moving

Toward the smell of green

Under all the concrete,

Clawed through parts of the map

That says there’s nothing here,

Until I found something.

My knees are ruined from it.

My hands are a record

Of every wall I went through

Instead of around.

Look -

I’m still bleeding a little,

But I don’t care. Come on.

This way. I mean it.

Not because I’ve arrived -

I haven’t, there’s no gate,

No light in sight yet.

But because the trek itself

Became easier to bear

Once I stopped trying alone.

I’ll cut out the next path too.

I’ll use my teeth if I have to.

You just have to trust

The red trail I’m leaving:

The only map

That worked.

This way. step where I stepped.

The ground’s already broken in.

I bled here so it’d be softer

For you, so you’d have

A path that already knows

The shape of our feet

(image credit: pinterest)

Pick a career. Pick a city.

Call your mother back.

Have you eaten? Have you slept?

What’s your five-year plan?

Get a pension. Get a hobby.

Stop wasting your potential.

Are you happy? Are you sure?

Have you tried journaling?

When are the kids? Where’s the ring?

You’re not getting any younger.

Be a little more like her.

Have you thought about hunger?

Move out. Move on. Move forward.

Make a budget. Make a choice.

Why so quiet? Why so lost?

Why can’t you use your voice?

Drink more water. Work out more.

Read the news but not too much.

Find yourself. But hurry up.

Stay in touch. Stay in touch.

But go out more. Live a little.

Stop being so serious.

You’re only young once, you know -

Why are you so mysterious?

Just decide. Just commit. Just go.

Stop overthinking everything.

What are you so afraid of?

What does your silence bring?

Pick a career. Pick a city.

Pick a feeling. Pick a path.

Pick a version of yourself

before the whole thing snaps -

Your name has taken

root behind my sternum,

blooms soft when I breathe,

warm as a tended thing-

I have made a home of you

without meaning to,

and woke one day full,

no longer hollowing.

You have grown into

the architecture of me,

the way ivy finds the cracks

and settles in.

I find you living

in my oldest, quietest places,

gentle and permanent,

as I always hoped something might.

This is not a choice I could

unmake now -

you are woven through

the fabric of my years.

Press your ear to my ribs:

you'd hear yourself echo back,

every chamber shaped

from being yours.

You have become a lung -

one I didn’t know I lacked

until the breathing grew so easy

and I understood:

I had been breathing wrong

all along.

Tangled in my own intestines,

Thoughts cannot digest.

Wrapping slick ribbons

Around my collar, my sternum,

And inevitably I am grounded.

Not buried but planted

Like a tree unable to bloom

Surviving on the sunlight

That slithers through

Your double-glazed defences.

Eat the flesh I bear

From the fruits of your labour.

The bread of my efforts,

Each strain baked till

I could no longer bear it

I hope you savour

Every bite.

I kneaded myself into the dough,

Pressed my palms until they bled,

Fed the oven with my hours,

My hollow mornings,

Sleepless thread.

The crust is golden - isn’t it?

The kind of gold that

costs a life.

Come, break it open at the table,

Don’t mind the salt.

That’s just the strife.

I rose the way bread rises -

Swollen, desperate, full of air,

Then collapsed beneath the heat of it,

And still I called the whole thing care.

So eat. Don’t let it go to waste.

I made it beautiful for you.

I ground myself down to the grain

So you could taste

something true.

I sewed her eyes shut

that September.

mouldy crochet yarn

embroidered

the rotting holes

in her skin.

I scrubbed steadily

at her surface,

polishing her

to ‘perfection’

one last time.

Reposting this short one I wrote a few years ago. Perhaps I’ll do a rewrite of this sometime.

Teeth graze the edge of exhale,

we gnaw

on marrow of longing,

tongues flutter like leaves in restless wind.

Skin splits under the surface,

raw with ache

of becoming,

Blood is a silent river

coursing the cracks of want.

We’re less flesh, more soil -

Unkempt in craving,

roots knotted in drought.

Our hearts pulse like sap, thick and slow,

each beat a nudge

that we are both thorn and petal,

softness cloaked in sharpness,

beauty biting the bitter.

We spill into the night,

a dark bloom spreading,

veins lit by the quiet burn

of what we cannot grasp.

Becoming. The way deep longing transforms you from the inside, slowly and without permission. How you can want something so completely and still never quite hold it.

I am an artist.

The title tastes rusty. Unworthy.

Fumbled from my keyboard and half-assed notes in notebook margins.

I am an artist

though i’ve barely touched a pen in months.

I’ve said it three times now in the mirror and twice it felt stupid and once it felt like the truest thing i’ve ever said about myself.

I’m going with the once.

I used to think there was a criteria.

A checklist somewhere I hadn’t been handed.

That other people were born already knowing the password and I was stood outside in the wrong shoes pretending I hadn’t noticed the door.

I spent a lot of time making myself smaller in case someone caught me believing in myself.

What a thing to be ashamed of.

I made things anyway.

Quietly. In borrowed time, in bad lighting, when I was tired and a little sad and probably should have been sleeping.

No one asked me to. No one noticed when I did.

I did it anyway.

I think that’s the whole definition, actually. I just didn’t know it yet.

There were years

I couldn’t find myself in anything I made. I’d look at what came out and think, who is she?

Not in a good way. In the way where you’ve drifted so far from something essential

that even your handwriting looks foreign.

I had to find my way back through the work itself. That’s what it’s for, I think.

Not the product. The finding.

I’m not going to tell you

I’m fearless now. I’m not.

I’m not going to tell you

I’m certain now. I’m not.

But I do the thing.

And afterwards I sit with it and think, yeah.

That was mine. I made that.

I am an artist.

Not because I arrived somewhere.

Not because it got easier or louder or more certain.

Because something in me refuses to live untranslated.

Because even on the days I haven’t written a word, haven’t picked anything up, haven’t felt like any of this belongs to me -

the title is still there. Rusty. Mine.

My teenage skin doesn’t 

Fit anymore, hanging loose, 

Blood pooling at the seams, 

A different family’s daughter 

Slithers into the bones I left 

In the room I grew up in. 

She wears my old face, 

Staring out of the 

Window into the backyard, 

where I buried so much

flesh beneath the fence line. 



I take a plane now, rip 

Through the clouds like

Old stitches, to visit my best friend, 

Instead of simply 

Taking a left onto her street. 

We catch up on new music, 

Exchange pieces of our old selves, 

Torn and sewn back together, 

Until we’re us again 



And once we’ve settled 

In the sagging skin of nostalgia, 

We listen to the same old songs

On repeat, like picking scabs 

Just to watch the wound bleed again. 



I no longer have a childhood bedroom, 

Only the scar of where it once was, 

But I have her sprawled out beside me. 

Breathing, heartbeat syncing with mine

As I straighten stands of hair, 

Pulling them taut, like ligaments, 

Brushing away the dead ends. 



I no longer have a childhood, 

But I have a childhood friend

living with me now

Who remembers all the places 

We used to bleed.