I suspect that I’m a little bit in love with you
 

but that would be ridiculous because I don’t know

if your wrists sit snugly in my hip dips. Ridiculous

because I don’t know whether you’ll find the mayhem

of my body — its scars & sanguinary history — attractive,

comfortable, sexy, or if you’ll see me as badly sketched,

a Wembley market knock-off copy of beauty. Ridiculous

because I don’t know if you’ll agree to draw my eyebrows on me

when I’m dead. (I worry the mortician will fuck it up royally — paint me surprised

or somehow sadder than I always was am. All the reference photos are frauds.

I’m not that pretty IRL.) I don’t know if you’ll think of me as Sexton

thought of Lowell, so gracefully insane, or just plain crazy. Ridiculous

because I don’t even know how you take your tea. I have had reality

stripped from me before: it was barbaric, sheer barbarism. Psychosis

is no joke & you like girls who are funny. What if it’s as simple as:

I am in control of my emotions. Hahaha. This little bit in love with you

feels silly now, like chain-smoking menthols on petrol station forecourts

or crying at Missing Cat posters outside of my own postcode. Ridiculous

because I have a feeling we’ll still be paying off the wedding long after the divorce.

Ridiculous because I don’t know if you’ll fight for me in the same way

my flimsy fake eyelashes rail against the gale force winds that whip

filthy violences through Tube tunnels, that assault me while I’m teetering

in size 3 skyscraper heels on the platform at Turnpike Lane, waiting

to be whisked into the city madness again. Would it upset you

to learn of the lovely, faceless men who send me money for tweeting

lipsticked selfies or supporting the right football team or something?

This little bit in love with you is beginning to feel risky, too blindly

optimistic like when I buy tiny summer sundresses in autumn

knowing full well that I may not be alive to wear them next year.

Ri-dic-u-lous. I don’t know if you even like girls who burn

their bare thighs drunkenly whizzing down hot metal slides

in their minds. This little bit in love with you feels like walking home

from a church I don’t belong to, post-exorcism, openly weeping

blisters laddering my Achilles: each step a small-but-not-insignificant agony.

Is this progress? I am sitting with the consequences of living

after two decades spent actively trying to die. I am so tired

of tragic accidents. Give me happy deliberateness or nothing.

I suspect that you are not a little bit in love with me.

I think you’re just cuntstruck, or in love with the idea of me,

the concept, the dream. I just want somebody to love me

beyond language & reality. Is that really too much to ask???

Good news: I finally got sick of listening to the blues

of troubled strangers during endless drugged-up dawns

in randomers’ kitchens; the birds of EN5

sounded strangled & so did I. Now I’m alive

in cleaner, safer, saner ways (573 days self-harm free!)

but this little bit in love with you is, in all likelihood,

more wound than salve because love always wounds

me spectacularly, always turns septic. Tranquility is of no poetic use. Good,

because we only deal with chaos in this house. If I told you of my sadness

about my sadness, is that the level of radical disclosure that you’re after?

Know that I will not be satisfied with crumbs: I am romantically anorexic,

haven’t been fed or fucked in any of the fun ways in months. (Fucked up, sure,

but…) Look at me, the Lady of Situationships, voluntarily

providing answers to all the questions the silly boys before you

never cared enough to ask. Will you ask the questions?

Or will it always be me? By ‘it’ I mean ‘the person you love’…

Co - Star just sent me a notification & now I’m suspicious

because it’s too fitting: Falling in love is a form of temporary madness.

Honey, I am all the way insane. I will give you poetry,

endless poetry, but you’ll have to write it yourself;

I can’t write when my vape has run out of battery

& it’s happening again — love or psychosis or tragedy

or just a cruel blue light blinking to remind me

every beautiful thing in my life dies too

quickly. Please don’t let this be true of me & you.

 

 

 

 

Future Corpse

 

— a poem comprised of ‘one true sentence’s, after Ernest Hemingway

 

The moment he died, Mother began digging
through the detritus of her backpack; I was on the floor,
bawling, Brother was punching the locker & then Mother

was shoving her cracked Cath Kidston pocket mirror
under our dad’s nostrils to make sure he was dead,
to confirm, as if we didn’t already know. Death is wasted

on the dead; I’d relish it more than them, do a better job.
Today’s affirmation (say it x10): I love my future
corpse. The only person more exhausted than me

is the sun. The disgraced psychiatrist told me that
I love at an untherapeutic level. Why don’t you
understand that me throwing myself off

the roof of Wood Green Shopping City is also me
running down to ground level to catch myself?
Read that again, properly. To have my poetry read

by so many strangers is akin to that ultra-specific rush
of embarrassment when you’re buying milk in Tesco
& your card is declined, the flush of panic even though you know

you’re not skint; we must be Very British whenever this happens, loudly
& awkwardly inform the queue that we definitely DO HAVE money.
The scariest thing I ever wrote while psychotic was ‘I AM STILL HERE’

in handwriting that wasn’t mine, scrawled huge across two pages in blue biro;
I did not, & still do not, know who ‘I’ is. It was funny when we broke up
& everybody congratulated me; I have stored thirty-three

variations of ‘YAYYY congrats queen!!!’ in my cheeks
like a feral squirrel; this cheerleading will sustain me
through the winter when loneliness sets out to murder

my future corpse, make it Present. My arms are wet, leaking
from lacerations of godliness. I am trying to outrun a plague-swarm
of beloveds & stalkers. I frown upon the sexual tension

stewing between my unrealised dreams. I am beyond tired
of all this mind-full-ness, of my unforgettability, of my anxiety
disorder being more ambitious than me, of HLR always

saying she will buy the flowers herself, of Beepy Dee, tired of being
‘painfully attuned’ to everything. This morning I howled at the moon
& she howled right back at me. All of this is confidential

by the way. He hit me & it felt like a hit. I never write in blue ink.
You make me want to take up smoking again. Please know that
if you don’t accept simultaneous submissions, you will receive

my worst poems. No breakdown is complete without cutting
bangs with a razor. Dad, when I light up a stick of nag champa,
it means I need you. I have heard that the Pacific is sick

with longing to touch me. I write for all the girlies
who subsist on a diet of Americanos & spite. I can’t
believe you actually died. There are unscreamt screams

rushing beneath my skin. The final line of every poem
I’ve ever written is always the same: Don’t you dare
fucking leave me.

 

 

Half of ‘violence’ is ‘love’: an assay

 

Violence: living every day with the energy of a grave emergency.

Love: a heartfelt public apology for my depression’s inelegance.

Violence: looking too sexy when I slipped out of the ruby-red dress of torment.

Love: the way that silken anxiety pooled like fresh claret around my stigmata’d feet.

Violence: the anniversary of the final time your mum picked your kid-self up & put you down.

Love: my mother constantly putting me down, so I don’t have this tragic anniversary.

Violence: abandoned first drafts becoming poltergeists, flinging pens around the house.

Love: the old lady who yawned obnoxiously during America Ferrera’s iconic Barbie speech.

Violence: the fact that I am the forgotten clementine rotting in your Oxfam tote bag.

Love: you checking your bag now. See? There I am. You saved me. Aren’t you pleased?

Violence: Fitbit informing me that my 24-minute panic attack burned 80 calories.

Love: the front door winking at me as he leaves with the last of his belongings.

Violence: the secret that has nothing to do with me but is killing me.

Love: nice try, darling, but I’m an Aries (i.e. you couldn’t waterboard it out of me).

Violence: trying to take a photo of the supermoon on your antiquated Samsung.

Love: readers pinching the arse, waist, ruddy cheeks of this poem.

Violence: you annotating this poem with your baffled critique in sloppy green ink.

Love: my sanity as a crime scene, outlined in white chalk on the concrete of Bond Street.

Violence: me rhyming big dicks with work ethics.

Love: when I asked Teya, Is this too much bronzer? & she said, No such thing.

Violence: a self-inflicted injury as a treat for feeling stable all week.

Love: me rhyming aşkım with punch him.

Violence: seeing my kindness so often that it became unremarkable to you.

Love: the list of relatable Dostoyevsky characters & quotes stashed in my Notes app.

Violence: the margin of error being wider than the page.

Love: schoolgirls smearing their faces in a thick coat of Vaseline before catfights.

Violence: guzzling tins of premixed Pornstar Martini at Marx’s grave on his birthday.

Love: always having a failsafe exit plan (for parties/relationships/pain/your body/this life).

Violence: giving myself to sleep, splayed on a silver platter, with a Royal Gala between my teeth.

Love: the people who find my alarming BPD behaviours charming, endearing, beguiling.

Violence: a never-once-shaken snow globe containing a desert oasis scene.

Love: giving myself to death, stylishly gift-wrapped, with a gold bow on my head.

Violence: the wrench of his last breath resting on my brain, like oil on the surface of minestrone.

Love: my body being an awkward Tetris brick that fits nowhere, prompting GAME OVER.

Violence: the total hours I’ve spent hurtling along the carotid arteries of the Northern line.

Love: my aborted longings stored in labelled Kilner jars, pickling in vinegary brine.

Violence: the imprint of his cheating lips when he sipped my memory foam latte.

Love: the sweet girl who believes this city could do with more rats.

Violence: telling me to cheer up, luv! if you’ve never ovulated.
Love: It might never happen! Violence: It already has.