I was attracted to the forest long before I was you;
the air was thick, heavy, red with blood which masked your perfume.
The sky was dark with a deep etched moon, and that’s when I
noticed you under the Juniper Tree.
The first thing I did was to crush the birds, singing so beautifully
over your body, with a millstone. Owl, raven, dove, all dead.
The moonlight tangled itself in your flaxen hair upon your frail head.
Your skin was cold against mine, a casket of led.
You had weeping holes for eyes and cloud kissed cream for skin;
you had no choice but too let me in. To let me moan, too scream,
to sin. I fucked you in that pale fairytale light in till your palette
of cream mixed with ebony and blood.
Long then your stomach burst open with life, blithe silver limbs
and somber gold expression. I called it the sole de la lune.
Or the monsters which crawled from your womb, from my reeking
love, my one and only, my disenchanting, stained, sleeping beauty.
I’m just the devil and you’re just a man
and the gaps in my bones are nothing but air
and the gaps of your eyes don’t see me
and you just don’t, don’t, don’t understand
I love you. From the tips of your toes to the top of your head, to our matching freckles and your inwards pointing feet and your breathe in the winter and your skin in the summer. I love the pterodactyls in my stomach, the sick feeling I get when I catch your eye, the way you speak, the way you hold my hand even when your scared of my double-jointed-click, how you kiss my nose and downward. I love your face when you squint and how you eat. The way your toes arch and stretch in bed and how you sound and feel and taste. I love your puppy nose kisses and the way you do your hair and the way that you care but pretend you don’t and tell me not to be silly when I am and tell me the same even when I’m not. I love that you have made me feel like the most important person in the world. I want to explore with you, I want to travel with you. I want to buy millions of puppies and a cat for myself and make you feel happy when your sad and kiss you when you sleep, and hold you all night no matter how much you move around. I want to spend the rest of my life doing everything in my power to make you love me. I want to tell each other stories about cats and bears, and make you love Disney as much as I do and prove to you that those things can be real. I want you to share your cleverness with me and teach me new things and never get bored of me and always I want to watch all your favourite films and make hot chocolate and get trains to weird places, and play and love and fight and sing and call you wonderful and forgive you for everything and let the past go. I love that no matter what happens, no matter how we argue and hate each other and hurt each other, no matter how many times we make threats, or fail to understand one another, I will never forgot how happy you make me or how happy I made you. I will never forget falling asleep under tree’s in the middle of the winter and forgetting that other things exist, making love in the woods, waiting for you to come back from holiday, simple texts which meant the world, countless meals, platypus farms, Jamie’s italian, our very first date and our love in bones, the way you smell, our non-matching school uniforms, our sleeping rule, our painting and colourful. I’ll always remember the premier in London, and sleeping with you by Trafalgar square and being moody and cold but happy and kissing you under monuments and eating McDonald by parks and that night on my birthday and showers we never had and watching the lion king and holding hands and realising that we’re so small and the city is so big but we love each other so much.
I know it’s too late, and you won’t change your mind and you’ll move on and be happy and have a new adventure and new small, important things and fall in love and fall out of love and get hurt and hurt others. And with luck I’ll let go and be happy, I’ll love and be loved in the way that we both deserve. All I know is, that for now, you are perfect to me.
i play the sinking ship;
wishing luck over the carcass moon,
counting stars the night has strewn.
i’m drowning where x marks the spot,
on all the places our love forgot and
all the places where treasures lain,
to mourn all the dragons which you have slain.
And yet, skin should be only skin;
lashing out in want for destructive palliation and
skinning the word infinity off your sweet back
because in the darkest of hours I am nobody,
and your stomach lost all sense of flapping as
I breathed
you breathed
but still I live the places you can’t find, where
the binding of my feet pales against the stars
soft vibration and somewhere between Scylla
and Charybdis, ships will be mourning.
Skin isn’t skin in the sense you know.
Oh no.
I always believed gold can stay.
I hue and faint in a golden divide;
where stars melt opulent in his dark eyes.
To banish the summer, to hath beauty hide;
to scream, yet die! watch cold winter’s arise.
The cardinal of blood will to soon flutter,
and the ocean-song shall sweetly re-sound!
yet the wind murmurs what we dare no utter,
while Aphrodite blesses a heart to abound.
then, my hands, as flowering vines star wreathing,
aching to hold the soft palette of his face.
For as I watch his sighing and breathing,
I grow alarmed by love’s stinging grace.
You will never know how I burn,
how when you bound my feet in
a sadness which you bled that I,
writhe. When did my God not love me?
We were powerful and beautiful!
every mortal could feel it, their bones
alive with another’s love and pain.
I said our ribcages couldn’t handle it.
But Zeus! was it not for you that you
made me this way? you must feel
the tenderness of my love and how
my chariot still drags stars through the
sky in order to make you stronger.
Yet, you lie with another.
and another.
Your palms were once so anxious, my love!
did the lightning scald them in some
terrible way? I pray not.
And beckon still, call I upon The Earth-Shaker!
summoning tempest, O morose ocean maker!
and cleaving myself on sharp horned rock;
where the callow of skin shall gush and rot
and the cardinal of blood will blister and churn
yet, my body and bone I achingly yearn;
so bleed in to the ocean to arise a pink foam,
where the dragon sap weeps to carry ship home,
and it’s through the dour shores I sail!
so follow my body, the lug of entrails!
Oh beautiful muse, watch the dying of mine!
gazing with honey-milk eyes, so divine!
Aphrodite has placed a blessing on thee;
where faint and flush under blooming tree.
So I breathe, still, unfurl loveliness from your eyes,
where the doves fall in a golden divide.
But weep, O Goddess of all that I am!
for what in my heart is it that you condemn?
just come, fall, in to my burning arms
where smoulders the skin of beautiful charms!
yet - quiver and rise in rosy fingered dawn
where the pink gold hues are gently drawn,
and the foam of the sea spills and sings;
searching the sky of lovelier things.
and yet, I’ll never be the daylight,
which sings over the west, so delicate;
the tide washed away everything I am,
or will be, or could be - can you see?
that day I built a castle in the sky,
I said “no god shall destroy, what’s made
in love shall stay” and yet the wind, still,
took it away, but I stayed evermore - as she said
In my palm, a opium poppy burst and spat;
burnt me blinded and blistered and cold
for what is a woman who isn’t a woman?
for I am just childish bones! oh misshapen
reeking bone! so tell me my darling Hera,
does it hurt when he looks at wisdom?
My brain, it douses my heart in hopeful magic,
and adversely in a terrible pain; for I know
that the ghosts I am seeing are ghosts indeed
and that, evermore, in the heart of the harp
I will lay my hand over hers and hope.
