& Now Moments Of Self-Reflection That You Most Certainly Do Not Need

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Or You Could Endure My Love

So you can carve Please Love Me into the waning skin of your waist in the hope that He or She will see it, skim fingers along the crude cuts and accept your need, all of your emotional flaws, accept all of your lonely, all of your angry.
Or you can tie all of your want up, light the ends, like sage. Evict the ghosts from your halls.
Wish for something more fulfilling, maybe, but be blissful with what you have.
Be happy with what you have.

When They died, sometimes I would lie on my side during the day and think of funerals and ashes, of hospitals floors and older men falling to pieces. Weathered faces in pain, curling in to keep the warmth in, the cold air that comes with sick realisation.
I would do this for days and for lengthy periods that split these days apart, I would will you to call me. My weak telepathy had no effect, things always stayed silent, or I would break the quiet with my plea out-loud. Please Call Me. Air without oxygen and all my deadly thoughts feeding off it. Please Call Me.
It does take an ocean of sick and unanswered asks to regain any sense of pride or ‘strength’ you believe you might have.
Because no one calls, but you get up anyway. The sun comes in its reliable rhythm.
Things like this you can have faith in. 

Secular

Describe a time when you pretended to be someone or something you’re not.

Seventeen. ‘Tarting up.’ That’s what he used to say. ‘Let’s get tarted up and attract some things.’ The weekends were a recurring Halloween. Decorating our appendages, sparkly things too young to be considered brave. So presumptuous, in his defence, he had the most impressive bone structure. I was his round-faced accomplice, no, ‘You’re my sweet ticket in.’ Counterfeiting cool, that’s what I felt. I pretended then. 

Then, I assumed the air of confidence, A clever disguise with holes, the ones I saw through. Shaking, quick glances at my hands and feet, ill-fitting dresses, nervous heels. I always gave it away when I stretched to snap at a light-switch, my limbs were too repulsive, then. Nobody else appeared to be pretending.

Later I was acting calm and needless. Holding my hands together on my stomach while he slept on and I was so terribly disappointed in everything I viewed or listened to, I dabbled in nicotine piano playing, singing soul-less songs while my fingers burned, felt like putting them in my ears. Outside while his dreams were elsewhere and I just couldn’t seem to grasp mine. I was a fake. I needed everything. 

Now you would need a psychic or a therapist so see through my bluff, so thick with pretence it rounds my elbows, angry points, down to the quick. Such an ugly masquerade, no matter how grand my plans are. I am superhumanly lonely. I mouth the words to defiance or defence but I hear my flatmate bring someone giggly home and just lean my head back flat against the wall, look at my unsophisticated knees, feel the hollow underneath my ribs swell and stain my chest. I cross my arms over my face and turn everyone willing away because what I need is artless, humble affection. Not a crassly bundled relationship. Yes I desperately want skin but I don’t want the dates or troubles. Candour, my worst enemy. I can’t seem to spit you out, lest I be named a man-eater or worse please I don’t want to upset you because for a reason I can’t fathom you want more than this. I would like.. Someone to kiss my eyelids and twist an arm under my waist but also leave in the morning and maybe call around again in a week or few days.

Who cares what you think of this. It is difficult to not let slip how sick of myself I feel based on everybody sick of me. Or made sick by my form.

Playing at satisfied, content. Something the naive might believe. 

Haik-You. (Wouldn’t Want Me)

Sleep won’t find me now
If I asked to share your sheets
Would you let me, please? 

I promise never to say anything bad about you again. I do hope you defended me occasionally. I don’t ignore the want for your skin, It’s the only thing I want from you anymore. I will never want to meet your parents, but after consecutive months of cringing from normal pain, I only want your waist. 

Up For Anything (Again)

This is nothing:

Leave the brilliant of before behind. For the fantastic of the future. My plans involve a skyline you don’t share. Sucker.

Gym at 5pm. Feels like highschool. Except a highschool I didn’t attend. Girls were never mean to me, really. Until I started sharing sheets (and maybe too many beds).
But even then, the good ones hung on. Pretty little barnacles. Thanks for enduring my fluttering eyelashes and permanently bruised neckline. Scarves in summer.
I had a really productive eighteenth year. 
You wouldn’t know it now, but I had a permanent wink settled between my still barely-white teeth.  

My room is the only room I’ve known to feel completely safe at night.
My parents, that share a valley, and us, but nothing else, both of their respective homes reek of distress and the downstairs of each haunts me. A stroke of anguished oxygen against my exposed shoulders.  My room, now, though. I collapse behind its doors. Like its interior is buoyant. Swimming in my sleep.

What of sexual frustration? WHAT OF IT? And maybe they’re called love handles because someone will love them.
Or you could just call them hips. 
Or you could call them a repellent. Citronella body-parts.

You’re just a boy. That’s it. The world isn’t a French film. Subtitles spewing cross legged and dotted I’s over screen.And I’m not really worthy of affection. I’m a bit of an idiot. And I sometimes skip a few days between shaving my legs. 
You’ll find a lot of girls do. This is something I’m confident of.

Here’s something:

Maybe I am a slight lonely, at last. It is comforting to have to make do with myself. To confront this idea ofsomeone else making things’ better’. When things aren’t actually bad? And.. I spent two hours typing up book quotes.. Instead of time I would have perhaps spent, before, pounding the streets to meet someone or find someone or run into someone to take my mind away from itself. There is a disconnection with company. And I enjoy finding book quotes. I am ravaging books and washing my face and sipping tea and wiping surfaces. 

I Would Own You, Too.

Wake in the infant morning to turn at both taps with vice-like hands(because they drip and if you are going to waste water, please do so through well-meant means. Half clean dishes I will have to wash again). I make a sweet rice dish in memory of the Sister I once had (when she was everything she was supposed to be. Young and trying. Making plans and mistakes), in my dreams she says she never liked it, remarks my lodgings look like the corridors and classrooms of our high-school. Someone else sits on the end of my bed and smokes a lone cigarette, I deliberate over my hunger for isolation. I don’t need to worry, they leave soon enough. I go out for lunch with my Mother and pick at something I am supposed to be swallowing. I watch the concern touch her features. It dances from one eye to the other. I don’t watch for long, her unrest gathers into piles that resemble fear; I recognise disdain in the taut grip around my own neck. She is not scared for me. She is pondering what she might have done wrong. I wish I could tell her now, without building to the conversation (first I would tiptoe, then dip a finger in and under and only then would I start to lower my limbs inside); I don’t know if you did anything. I don’t know what is wrong and when it started. There is also a part of me that doesn’t want to gift her relief. Because she is always the victim, and maybe for once she should be the predator. She should be in the wrong.

I lied about my age a lot when I was younger. I wonder how long it will be before I am tempted to say I am younger than I am.

Well-fed is a much more pleasant (and possibly honest) way to describe a curvy, jolly person. It is like the lean back after a large festive meal. It is content and it is dazed.

If I were to give you sole credit. If I was to rely, depend and count on. If I were to trust you. You had better not hurt me because I swear to fuck I would kill you. I would come round to your place and I would push my fist into your face, claw at your neck. Stuff like that. 

Helping the listless

Can we just forget, the shortcomings we keep swaddled inside our heads. Just for once, can we step out of our dark and seething rooms, with the curtains drawn and our lights out. You know who you are. Take a breath of all that damp air you surround yourself with, on purpose, still. Take a breath, take a step [to the right, or left, maybe it’s right in front of you], out the door you’ve framed with images of idols who maybe spent the same sections of their lives indoors, but broke out [like you should]. Gulp it back, those fears and the inadequecies that plague whatever life you wish you could be living. So the dreams you have of the ideal you keep, they are riddled with little black dots. Like a swarm.

A virus on the life you wish you could just reach.

And then there’s you and me.  

Reign Supreme

Television’s down, internet’s down. Sitting in my fathers living room like What the fuck do I do? It shouldn’t be like this. I play piano until my little brothers start wailing at me. Drinking coke zero on the steps, twiddling my thumbs.

Had a dream I gave everyone head last night. And had sex with a girl in public. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

Didn’t have sex with my boyfriend at fifteen. Wonder if I had. Would it have changed anything?

Every once in a while I catch myself smiling at not hiding the curve behind a hand. Outside, burning the white off my skin. Spilling beer over grey singlet and collarbone [left].

Shaved my legs, cut my left ankle instead. Weak water, pink footprints all over the tiles. Was a shared bathroom. I sit and smoke in the bath for hours.

I am being accused of so many things at the moment. Really I just want to turn my skin the other way around, bleed and cry in front of my accusers. Show them I really just want everyone to be happy and get along. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, really. And I’d scrape the skin from my wrists, in a silent agony, begging for someone to love me because I feel so incredibly leaf-like. Like all my veins are showing through, and the tree wants rid of me.

So I’d just drift and fall.

But would that be so bad?

Well hey. We did the hard time. Five months, huh. GOOD EFFORT.

I really liked your album. It’s a shame I hope to never hear it again.

Woke up drunk. Waved a huge hello to last year. OH WE MEET AGAIN.

Sometimes I remember shit I thought I’d forgotten and it scares me that my memory is something I have very little control over.

“If you tried to put your hand on my stomach it’d disappear”

Venlafaxine because, really, who said you have to have a problem with yourself? And that it’s normal? I know we can’t change society, now It’s too far gone. But society can medicate us. In a way.

Me and terrific-isms. Screaming ‘SMILE’ in my empty house because I feel the need to claw my way back to crazy. The crazy I was in January. The sarcastic then cross-eyed, loose-limbed little girl. Hi. My name is _____.

Sleeping on pillows with no cases. Thinking of how many different heads have rested here. Creepy as fuck, actually. CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE REMIND ME TO DO MY FUCKING WASHING.

In a bar feeling eyes on places like my neck and ladders in my tights. Shudder at the thought of all these bodies in slumber, alone, later tonight.

So lonely, this city can be. Standing in here, you wouldn’t know it. But I recognise the desperate in everyone. For once I’m feeling secure. Like a wrapped up box in a room full of scraps and ripped edges.

I’m keeping that message.

When you’re shy it’s like organs filled with needles. Every eye a magnet. Every touch on bare skin is agony.  

Oh my. Need sleep.