hate

Until death do us part, my love; death took our first gasps.

Not the little death of our thousand filthy fucks,
not the poetic death of the Cure's underwater closets;

just hate relentlessly eating its children,
bingeing on the good,
just the inevitable loathing, just my muscles growing new ways, just your skin decaying -

just your pitiful craving for a wife-mother a grotesque amalgamation of all you lack, suck at the tit and lap at the cunt and never leave the womb -

just the slow drip feed of reality erasing us until we meekly return to grey and stop paining the faithful with our radiance.

half life

give me no part in this half life,
I refuse to sit by and love with diseased heart,

to portion up my life and send you rescue parcels whilst the stockpile is safe.

take my entirety and love without rancour.

so sick of part-time lovers.
take me in anger, take me in regret, take me in pain not ease.

I will not stroke your ego, I cannot detract the years from you, I will not be your fuck buddy, your NSA girl, your mistress, your whore,

those days are dead and gone.

fed up of spilling virtual ink over the perennial you, I attempt to write of the world, of esoteric concerns but

I am no painter of watercolours, I cannot show you the beauty of a still life.

the way my world spins compels me to show you the delirious joy of life with no centre of gravity.

Learning to swim

27 degrees in the shade but never enough to  bring us back to earth. 

Every drop of sweat from underarms was glorious damp and crumpled sheets of abandoned bed, every sunburnt cheek the flushes of ecstasy, every layer of peeling skin a reminder that there was so much time to take each other off and expose the raw selves underneath.

I wasn't allowed to find my bearings. It ruins the magic. I must leap,  naked and terrified, engulfed and consumed by the fear of drowning. I must dip my head and be cleansed, burn with the chill or die ignorant ashes. 

I trusted, and I leapt. I expected revolution but breath deserted me. My lungs drew waterfalls. ice rushed my bones. 

Through foil and saline, I swore I'd never do it again. Was it not sufficient to destroy my body and flood my mind with fear? 

'No,' you laughed, pushing tattered spectacles up your button nose. 'And darling, you never even swam. All you did was dip your toes.' 

For Ben

Catch my eye, my love,

I hope the fleeting glance gives you the smallest ray of hope that it's not just you, it can't just be you.

If it is then what are you but another of Ginsberg's angelheaded hipsters perpetually struggling against the darkness?

if it is, then we are all doomed.

If it is then you will never throw off your shackles and run defiantly into the night with an army who bear your scars and will carry you tear choked and stumbling when you can't find your way,

You will never surface gasping every single breath the first and last you will take, never fix the watery sun in your sights and pierce the membrane emerging into the sunlight sepia tone can't fix,

You are not alone, and my love on your broken body you keep the secret of a life which has threatened to destroy us all;

But you had the strength to fall from grace, to land on asphalt and linen and padlocked cabinets.

and I swear you have the strength to climb, even if your hands bleed and your lungs burn because there are countless like you, dangling toes and dropping rocks from the precipice and praying for your gaunt limbs to drag themselves back up and tell them,

How you ate the fruit and charmed the serpent and couldn't bear it again, how you crawled destitute on your hands and knees towards the smallest glimmer of light.

If you won't catch my eye, my love, catch theirs, hold their hands and feel the sunlight warm your back again.

Flesh

Borne of passion and continued because its razor-sharp teeth had clamped down on our flesh, because its intoxicating brew had worked its way into our bloodstream - the lovesick disease was killed before it had the chance to sever the spinal cord and change the future forever. 

How did it happen? Our bodies, our bones, were supposed to grow old and fuse together, not twist and crumble and turn to dust. We are so old, our faces distorted to cover a truth neither we nor the world could bear.

You have taught me how to be disappointed, and instructed me not to trust the world; You have opened me and poured in hate; You have sealed me shut and left me to decay. 

a part of me will always shine a little less brightly for having known you. 

white bread and restlessness

conversation laps at the edges of our consciousness but it never really threatens to engulf us.

we'd all like to write ourselves as the misunderstood hero, the boy who might or the girl who did, to twist our lazy slump into a night watchman biding his time. but the truth is we stay in all week because we spent all our money in Soho, we eat curried chickpeas and we fall asleep in front of Newsnight.

we drown in books and films, and music and radio, and still we have nothing to say,
somedays I look inside my mind and marvel at the wide open spaces,
why is my body so slow that it's all I can do to walk and breathe at the same time,

why

when I say I'm reading Lenin am I nearly always fucking,
when I say I'm writing my magnus opum am I eating white bread and watching mindless television,
all the while wracked with guilt that I'm not reading Lenin?

losing my head

I awoke this morning to find my head so cumbersome that my neck could no longer take the strain

millennia bearing down on just twenty two years of skin, sinew and a soft cushion goaded into life by second helpings all day long

dreams of grandeur piled under the concrete block of the work-pay-rent beat, the wallet that never stretches to a new pair of shoes but softly squeezes another round at the bar, caresses cocaine and greases the cab driver's palm

the thousand books I devoured were light; the unbearable weight of the millions I will never read finished me

today my body crumpled and sagged with the impossible understanding of what it will never be.