I chewed your name in silence,
reduced it bit by bit to nothing,
still could not swallow,
so I spat out the broken syllables into trepid air,
where they had dripped from your mouth
(like lemon drops),
feeding me after pages of licking sentences
in search of you.

The world
(at its centre a carnation_
swallowed us river by river
the waters of its sloth threaded
through our spines
vertebrae
by
vertebrae
the shape of our grief
becoming blue
stones at the bottom
of a wishing well

Do not assume love has lent me any aesthetic value, I am merely coincidentally ornamental.

If each of us has another missing, then the want of you wakes me in the night. Pitched against the darkness of childhood dreams is the memory of the day you marked me, setting the poetry of our lives in motion.

You were like all good things, like cream inside a sliver spoon or light from a pink lampshade and you left a taste in my mouth that couldn't quite compare with any other.

You split my lip in the dark, and having galloped past the pleansantries, stopped at nothing.

What does it feel like to be inhibited? It feels like being a mess of all things at once, mixed up, screwed, unable to sort yourself out or tell bottom from up. Suddenly everything about you is squeezing past the tip of a needle, and what you have become vanishes past the sting of the first pinprick.

The thing about obsession is that you are supposed to fill all the wide empty spaces with shiny distractions. You are supposed to get wrapped up, delirious, jam your brain to maximum capacity with inconspicuous detail. You are supposed to let it all consume you, rendering all else insignificant, but this is only possible if you are oblivious.

Nothing like a good housecleaning.