i said that i would write one for you

he is the boy who always
listens when nobody else will

i am the girl who waits until
everybody else has left the
house just so i can let every
syllable that escapes his
lips consume every
corner of my mind

he is the boy who empties
words that he cannot say
to anybody else unto me

i am the girl who feels
the same, nods and
echoes the pain

he is the boy who tells me
that he cannot bring himself
to love his father because his
father refuses to love him

i am the girl who wants the
boy to be loved, because
he loves everything else
in this world so fiercely

he is the boy who dances
under the sun and kisses
under the moon

i am the girl who watches
and smiles and knows
that i will never have
anything quite like
that again

he is the boy who tells me
that not even the people
he could spend hours and
days and weeks with will
ever understand him

i am the girl who will
always understand

he is the boy who is
judged for something he
is not

i am the girl who is judged
for something that i am

he is the boy who will
never refuse to stop loving
even if miles of grey tar mac
stand in the way

i am the girl who will never
be able to behave herself
the way in which he can

he is the boy who loves the
right way

i am the girl who can never
fight drunken desire

he is the boy who tells
me that everything will
be just fine

i am the girl who could
never have asked for words
like these from anybody
else's mouth

he is the boy who listens
to the story that i have
only ever told a few people
and says that i can fight it

i am the girl who will
fight it

he is the boy who will
fight it
too

letter to my mother

i'm never going to send this; i
don't let you read
anything
because it makes me feel better,
but also worse, like the day i
read those letters you'd
written, hidden away in the dark
somewhere
in a private folder
private
from me
private
from any eyes, but
i still read them
because

i am a bad daughter;
i forgot
about Mother's Day this year
i forgot
to buy you flowers
to take you for a walk
somewhere quiet, where
the brown of the mud on the
bottom of your old walking boots
matched the colour of the leaves
of the oaks and the cedars.
i forgot
to take you out for lunch where
i would pay even though the dessert alone was
six pounds twenty
and i still hadn't found
a job. and this,
this
is all because
i am not a good daughter
like i was back then, if i
ever even was one

because now i have
moved out
and
i'm cooking my own meals,
drinking too much coffee and
hiding within the walls of
myself; i've lost
count of the cigarettes
even though i know that the smell
of them on his shirt collar
makes you sick, you having to sleep
in an ashtray for a bed. but
i love it here. i love being
so far away
and
not having to be home on time
not having to let you use the computer
not having to wipe down the table
load the dishwasher
listen to your arguments
sit at the top of the stairs and
overhear him screaming
at the baby, - she doesn't know any
better, does she?

- but this is not to say that i don't
miss you. i just prefer it when you treat me
like a grown up; talk to me about
politics
and
journalists
and
his mother's terminal cancer
because i do understand, i
really do. i like it when we
lean against the radiator and i
put an arm around you - because
i am so much taller now - and
i lean in and feel your
whisps of grey hair fall against
my cheek, and you read me articles about
cheap red wine
george clooney - your favourite
silver fox - and how expensive clothes
are from the Saturday paper.

please don't ever believe that you are
useless
or
not worth something
because you are, regardless of the
things he says sometimes when
he's full of Jameson's that make me want
to dirty my fists. you are the
cleverest person i know. i wish
to be like you
as strong as you
as ever-dissatisfied as you. you
have been through more shit than
anyone else i know. you are
better
than anyone else i know, and i want
to be able to know what all of these
long words mean when my kids
are reading Milan Kundera
and ask me to be
their dictionary. i want them to
admire me as i have always
admired you,

i hate it when we
break down, because
W E A R E N O T A B R O K E N F A M I L Y;
we just need
T I M E
and
P A T I E N C E
and
E A R S
and
H E A R T S
to calm down and
stop fucking about. i promise
to stop if he stops and she stops too,

so please can we not have
Christmas this year - can we just
learn to love eachother again?

untitled II ,

i have been thinking about
how recently i have become something new
how i have been packed into boxes and driven away from you
how one hundred miles of tarmac now stand between us
how my body cries out for you in the night and i bite the corners of my duvet and wish that my skin felt as soft as yours
how you used to fill up the empty space in my bed each afternoon
how we could lie in deafening voids of silence
how i could never look in your eyes, and
how everything i have just written is completely irrelevant because
i want only you

two

you have left a space in my bed
for yourself. lying beside it, fingers
stroking linen, will never be enough.
my delight, at finding a single
golden hair, splayed out on the
pillow; like a stolen thread it
curls with lust. scouring
the bedsheets, in search of your
smell, the shampoo that even
with ten washes will not escape
my senses. lying still, in silence
with one another, drawing your
outline with a single finger.
the way your hairs stand on
end, like hot static, cold palms.
you twitch as though you are
falling from a dream. these
leaving blues i get, this
quiet mourning; daybreak
not even ripping through the
curtains yet

one

you; the deep blue eyes of the ocean
swallowing me with your suction
slow seduction, beyond corruption
my fingertips touching the hairs
below your navel, i'm getting so lost
in this secret dark. but i am the
seabird; harbouring your thoughts,
spilling each morsel of flesh onto you,
your skin warmer than the
brightest day. swallow my lips inside
yours and slide ontop of me and
look up; we are seven years old again.
you are my loss of words. you are
my inability to fall back in love
with russian strangers, out of date
haircuts, blank spaces for hearts.
you; the eyes, aquamarine pools
bury your face into my chest and
whisper; i am not deserving of this

untitled ,

You did not read what I wrote because you were too young, too fragile. You did not read what I wrote because you were too old, too stale. You did not read what I wrote because you were too afraid. And were you too scared to let Jacquelyn read it, thinking that just because she is yet to reach her eleventh birthday, she would be afraid of that part in the second stanza where he extracts a knife from his coat pocket? Children fear
n o t h i n g

Would you not let Michael read it, thinking he would avert his eyes from the naked girl with the black pony?

And Lucy, would she bend her eyes away from the page when she
read the words; he hung with
blood dripping, the
silence swallowing the
night, the night swallowing the moans, and
be so in terror, that she ran home to mother and was so scared on seeing the midnight rider that she fell and broke her body;
who will find her in the morning ?

You did not show what I wrote to the guests at dinner because of that line in the third stanza where the young girl is crouching in the darkness, - her heart removing itself from her chest with fear - and he approaches from behind and begins to peel skin off her back like a new potato; she screams like a strangled baby. You did not show what I wrote when your parents came down from the North last Christmas because you did not want them to see what I had become in their absence

because I had become something new, something more

just another one about my sister

ten years is an awful' long time for
you to have been gone for, and
now i am older than you were
when you were still alive

but i am not yet clever
responsible
or good at art

the lane outside mother's, with
a football tucked all neat into the
crook of your arm, trying to
strangle me over a school dinner
because i told all of your friends
you played with barbies, getting
lost in a maze of corridors at
grandma's house, never getting to
sail downstream

but i will never be clever
responsible
or good at art
like you were

one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten years
and five or six days is an awful'
long time to not see your face
for, and to know that i never got
the chance to say good bye and
never will

foam beards in the bath, watching
Bambi in the children's ward,
stealing all your Tracy Beaker books,
trying to draw landscapes and
mansions and guinea pigs as well as
you

but i am not clever
responsible
or good at art

i am good at walking for miles and
miles without stopping, good at
making lasagne and doing headstands
and trying to make our parents proud

i remember buying you a white
t shirt with a photograph of an
island with a palm tree on; i
hope that you are there
now