One day, my world

will be one where I do not have

to beg the clouds for their silver linings.

Everything will just

be golden.

Standpoints

The rain makes rock pools

out of pot holes, turns grass shoots into

sea weeds and brick shards

become buried treasures. Leaves turn into boats,

buoyed by newfound footing

only to be tossed, less than tenderly,

by the maelstrom. The wind whips up

whirlpools, turns the pavement cracks

into shores upon which the waves

the breeze breathe into life

break. And I stand, God-like,

wondering who else could see the same kind of world

through the looking glass of my eyes,

or drown in the sadness when I remember that so many

would just see a puddle,

and nothing more,

and rush away to try and get out of the rain.

Across The Salt Water

There are some days that she calls,

purely for the sake of hearing my voice:

my rich tones that feed the soul, like tea

dripping gently down the gullet after

a warm swallow.

We sit,

stare, talk as if we really were sitting there,

side by side,

even though we are side by side

in some roundabout way. No such luck for

speaking thoughts straight

from mouths to ears to minds without Facebook eavesdropping,

but thank God for it.

I will cut Mark Zuckerberg a portion

of our laughter - profits - if needs must,

for we share plenty.

Thank God for her, sweet shepherd of souls,

beacon of light and calm in those raging storms.

And still home to so much joy, I call her

“safe”, call her “sister” as I did choose,

or as Fate did. We were meant.

Divine intervention or just the stars aligning getting their shit together -

it was meant.

Hers is a voice that echoes in my head,

when my ship is plunging through the sea,

when I am so full to the brim with salt water

it overflows.

She calls me home.

Even from so far away, she makes me know

that I will make it there.

I have heard of faith.

It is that thing that those who name themselves

“righteous” seek. They claim

to hold faith, to know it’s grasp, like it is

a mother’s stern hands or

a father’s frozen facial features

reflected in the eyes

of a would-be gospel song

drowned before the end

of its first verse.

It is neither. Faith is

an echo in an empty room, it is

a dream you cannot touch the second you wake from its clutches:

it is called possibility.

I have seen faith.

And it is not made for the righteous.

It does not belong to the holy.

It is built, and nourished, and kept living

on the backs and on the sweat of we,

sweet sinners.

Faith has no reflection.

I cannot tell you what it will look like to you

when, or if, you ever see it.

Faith lives in periphery and in shadow - it is

felt, but unseen. The righteous claim

to know its face, give it blonde hair and blue eyes

call it “angel”, call it “for the holy”,

but cannot name a single place

that its footsteps tread. Cannot recall

a single heart

that they have blessed their so-called faith with.

True faith is bred from heartache,

not privilege.

True faith is sought, and earned,

not given freely upon asking.

True faith is born out of sin,

not into holiness - holiness!

Wholly empty faith.

Give me sin and I will embrace the faith that comes

or does not come.

Give me sin and I will find a story,

a lesson, a purpose, a meaning,

in almost everything my eyes touch.

Faith lives in downtrod doorways,

not in cathedral ceilings.

Some Call It Sin, I Call It Sainthood

Mouth Guard

Sometimes, I talk in my sleep.

I grind the words out of my teeth,

squeeze the sentences out of my jaw

and wake

every morning with my head

still locked tight in the vice grip

of my dreams

and my nightmares.

My mouth would feel like a wrung sponge,

my mandibles ache like I’d stubbornly chewed gum

for too long trying to eek out the last

vestiges of its flavour onto my tongue.

And typically, there is nothing left to taste.

So now I wear a mouth guard,

not to guard me from the words I speak

in the realms of my make-real and make-believe,

but in the hope that those words come

from out of my throat, my heart, my love,

instead of from bone,

and locked jaw, and fear.

Shades of Red

When I was younger and depressed,

my words were a well that it seemed

no bucket could reach the bottom of.

There were always metaphors growing in the depths

like algae

on the surface of myself - I never really noticed

how much scum I had to skim away

before reaching the heart of it.

Young me wore my depression with my heart

outside of my chest

and covered by a white shirt -

too many people don’t know the difference

between bolognese stains and blood.

How can the shade of red look even remotely the same?

Depression takes, slowly. It is a kleptomaniac

that steals glasses of water from the well

every day.

After a few months, it starts stealing buckets.

Ten years later, and the well

is empty.

The bottom is just a shadow of a puddle,

and algae.

Goddamn,

I’m thirsty.

And I have so few words left.

Living With My Past

The past is not just something

you can leave behind.

It is a stubborn dog - mine is a jet black retriever -

trotting behind you

at an arm’s length. It barks at every

yellow car, just to remind you that it’s still there.

Every time,

you jump.

The past is a shadow

that clings too tightly to the space

that you no longer fill, at least

not completely.

You can forget,

but only for the most part.

You can try and train the dog, drown out the barking,

or just refuse to walk by the side of the road

or you don’t go out at all;

you can run as fast and as far as you want…

But that shadow will still cling

to your outline.

That dog will still bark almost every time

you see a yellow car.

You might go months, or years without seeing one.

Equally you might see one every minute.

The past is a bed that you cannot always get comfortable in,

but despite this, you fall asleep more often

than not.

The past is never easy.

Some days it is easier than others.

Some days, the dog only barks once when a yellow car goes past,

instead of howling like death is imminent.

Some days, the shadow walks behind you

instead of being in front, and in your way.

You’re not always comfortable.

But you manage to find comfort somewhere,

at least, more often than not.

How does rest always

manage to avoid those who

need respite the most?

03:48

Size Matters

This is the only time of year

that I sleep in a single bed.

Somehow that makes everything

that much more profound - like,

even if there

was

someone,

even if I

had

someone to share this bed with,

it would be far too small to hold us both.

If I had someone to share this bed with,

I’d sleep on the floor.

And oh, how I would be content.

Wallpaper Stories

My hands trace the wallpaper,

reverently. Fingers barely grazing

the patches they once picked clean:

stories written in Braille that near enough everyone

is too blind to read.

I feel for the empty spaces, those tales

that I carved out of the quiet

whilst tsunami met mountain two flights of stairs below me.

And the heavy of that silence screams so loud

that my fingers flinch, the nerve impulses

fire as if I had placed them upon hot coals,

those old words,

child’s etchings, sorry stories,

whispered back to me and echoing,

like I didn’t know them already.

Like they weren’t mine.

I place my hands back upon the wall,

hear the heartbeat of a younger, older, me

pulse through the space in silence.

And I feel my face fall, eyes pressed shut

to the white wallpaper,

lean my head against it to hear the remnants

and feel myself

splinter: full of something like regret,

something like a question -

“Did it really happen like this?” -

knowing the answer, something

like the disbelief

when someone tells you that the supermarket scanners

recognise the absence of darkness

rather than the presence of it.

Lepidoptera

There are words

breeding in the pit of my stomach

that I do not have definitions for.

Their origin story is acid and darkness,

their world, a rock that does not cease

in its shifting.

They are larval. They are caterpillars

crawling up my oesophagus. They

are pupae hanging, silent in my throat,

Waiting.

No butterflies yet, though they will

surely come.

Please, God, let them come,

let me conjure a breath with enough wind

to rip their wings from their bonds.

Let me find the right definitions.

Let me find something that fits them right.

They deserve so much better than my dark mouth, than

my bountifully hollow body.

They deserve light.

Freedom.

Love.

My Mind’s Aflight

The insomnia hasn’t completely gone.

I have been staring at the inside of my eyelids

for three hours.

Tracing the blood vessels lit by the memory

of my phone’s bright backlight.

I think of her. Think how much easier it might be

to sleep if I was beside her, wonder if,

hope,

that I’ll get the chance one day.

Preferably multiple days.

The sleep spray on my pillows soothes my nose

but not my mind. My brain is busy,

shipping out static along my neurons,

gives me restlessness in answer to my weary.

It’s still like this, sometimes,

and that’s okay.

I make peace with myself.

Feel my eyes get heavier, my limbs

stiffen into the temporary rigor mortis

of impending sleep.

Write this poem before it, too, like so many things,

drifts away on a dream

that is so soon in coming

that I cannot even see it.

Roslyn

It’s nights like this that I wish I smoked.

My hands fidgeting, twitching,

looking for something to hold on to,

dreaming of something tangible

to get a grip of, to find a stable place in,

like your fingers, your body…

To have something cling to my lips as readily

as a cigarette

or its smoke, off cuts of incense,

something holy,

wishing for your mouth on mine -

Fuck.

If I smoked, the tar

would clog my lungs, but then again

I’m so accustomed to losing my breath

and feeling my heart skip -

it happens every time I look at you.

I wonder,

if my head was full of the nicotine

would you be any less engraved into my mind.

Probably not.

Definitely not.

It’s ironic, isn’t it?

That you are the reason

I struggle to sleep, and yet

you are the source of all my dreams.

I have never smoked,

but I’ll be goddamned if the mere

thought

of you

isn’t my nicotine.

Inlustris

She tells me to write about the stars,

and I wonder where in the world or heavens above

does she want me to start?

Does she want literal? Physics and science -

does she want a poem

about the irony that the light that reaches our eyes

when we gaze up into the darkness is coming from a body

that’s probably already dead - we are seeing

the soul leave a dying body

whilst we’re too busy worshipping the carcass

and the bones,

calling them by their dead name, “star”,

when they are just matter.

Or does she want softness? Does she want the gentle

caress of a poem,

a lavish lullaby, languid, aurora borealis,

merry dancers, wending their way through

the constellations, no barriers or barricades.

Arcing limbs in every hue

stretching across the heavens, held tight in the arms

of the Milky Way,

so much bigger than just us.

Does she want the words I wield,

a telescope to scan the stars of my mind,

to tell her the truth of love?

Of my love.

To tell her that she is made of starlight and magic,

that her laugh rings with the music of

something beyond this world;

that when she smiles, my heart is like a rocket

leaping into orbit then a fuel tank falling

back to Earth -

that when she holds me, the very world stops rotating on its axis

to hold us, too,

can she feel it?

How time slows down as the gravity of the sun attempts

to pull us closer to one another.

How the tides bow to the will of the moon,

and the stars watch on in earnest,

eyes alive, a witness to the magic.

Such a normal thing, yet still universal.

It is the truest heaven on Earth, love.

And she is the only star in the sky that I have eyes for.

There are so many

places I want to go, just

to take you with me.

- Come Along

Affirmations

They’re just words, right?

They’re just words. Every time I see you,

they ride my tongue,

my voice a wave they intend to catch…

They burn like bile when they wipe out,

when I wipe them out.

Scald my throat as I swallow them back,

the punishment I take every time because

I’m too afraid you won’t want to hear them.

Not from me.

I overanalyse. I go back over everything two, three,

four times over,

read back through every message,

replay the memories of every conversation,

until like Jon Snow, nothing is all I know.

Am I reading too closely between the lines

or am I seeing what’s there?

They’re just words.

They’re just words and I’m seemingly so goddamn eloquent

so why am I so afraid?

Terrified my voice will be tsunami rather than gentle crest,

convinced my actions will cause mountains to crumble and earthquakes

instead of the bridges between us being strengthened,

the waters beneath them stilling, rippleless.

They’re just words.

They’re just words.

And they scare the fuck out of me

with their weight.

Can I call it what I feel or would that scare you?

Half truth is still a half lie so how do I make it honest enough for me

and still easy for you?

I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want what we have to break

under the weight of the words

that might not even form the right name for us.

But I have to ask.

I was too afraid to ask the one that came before,

and I cannot let the lightning of fear strike twice.

Besides… you are so much more.

You’re going to make me say it.

And I can’t keep telling half truths because it isn’t fair.

I don’t want to taint this with dishonesty.

They’re just words.

They’re just words,

yet they can be so many more things:

they can be a genesis,

or they can be the sound of the wave

breaking,

broken,

gone.

Texts I Should Consider Sending

You turn my eyes from eclipse shadowed to a solstice sun: you draw out my light so well.

I am fascinated by your hands, how delicately they lie, how strong they hold, how firm a fist they form, how hard they hit, I’ve felt it all.

No, not all, not yet.

To see your smile tread the path of your laugh-lines deeper into your face when we’re together is a privilege.

Every time you touch me, the static shock jumps from your fingertips to my back and travels down my spine. It’s as if we are living as the Creation of Adam in that split second. In that moment, you turn me God-Touched.

You’ve become a muse, an inspiration in your mere existence. There are more stories living in the sounds of your laughter than you give yourself credit for.

Sometimes they find their way into my own, and our tales dance, fables and autobiographies intertwined.

I want to hear them all. Every last word.

You take me as I am. Defend me from that which would hurt me, which is to say you defend me from myself. I’ve been unable to shove you out of the way of the shotgun my shadow holds - you know too well it won’t hurt you like it would hurt me.

I say I’m not worth it and you tell me to accept that I am.

I want to say so much that I don’t know if I can utter yet.

I want to tell you the stories my heart beats to me in the silence of the evening. Name them the phonetics of learning love.

There’s so much I want to tell you.

Like I want to tell you that I love you.

I want to tell you all the reasons why.

I want to show you all the ways I can.

One day I will.

And tonight, I realised

that you

are one of the only places

that I can call “safe”.

When I am scared, whether that be

stupid fear, spider fear,

or something deeper like,

“I’m scared I’m going to wither away, a stem

too far from the light to sprout its buds, let alone petals,

let alone full grown flowers,”

it’s you I call. It’s you I’m not afraid

to be afraid in front of.

And I’m goddamn terrified of what I think - what

I know - that means.

Deeper Fears than Spider Fear

Circus Tricks

My hands remember heavy,

like threads of lead have been stitched into my skin.

When I meditate, they lie, motionless

by my sides. My therapist says my fingers tap dance whilst I’m under,

says my subconscious is impatient - this

does not surprise me.

We are heavy beings in a heavy body;

too close to the moon, caught up

in her gravity, the tides of us waxing and waning

at what seems to be her fancy,

and when the lights go out and the smoke machines cloud the stars,

and her Cheshire cat wide smile is imprinted onto my eyelids,

I curl up, foetal,

untouchable even by the sun some days.

But I still

try

to stand.

Sometimes I make no sense. I walk the tightrope knife edge

balancing between clarity and nonsense,

I feel most days I lean too close to the latter,

my body too eager to fall into the ground’s

solid and waiting arms.

I don’t want to hurt, but sometimes I’m still so numb that the hurt

is the only thing I am able to feel.

I sense my subconscious shrink into herself when I get like that,

I try not to scare her, but it’s hard when I’m already scaring myself.

I try and breathe, now. I try to keep my balance on the tight rope.

And if I fall, there are people waiting with nets and mattresses

in case I slip through the cracks.

My body knows steady, it does,

but to forget how to fall is too much to ask.

After all, I am so damn good at falling -

anyone would be, with skin stitched

with lead thread.

The Falling

The summer is falling

from my grasp. The autumn winds

are speaking in my mother tongue, the language

of my birth; they sing in gale and

drizzle and abscission.

My heart thuds, ever dependable,

too reliable old faithful. The seasons are mourning

the loss of one of their own even at the birth

of another. I can hear it in the way

the trees protest, limbs wrought like iron

and strewn, discarded ribbons on roadsides;

I feel it in the strength of the windsong,

how it moves the doors of my house

even as they’re pushed shut, the way it

threatens to shatter the windowglass

with one note.

The tides are turning. The season is changing.

The moon has already marked her change in favour, the nights

are stealing colour from the daylight to give to the leaves as they fall

to mark the coming of the darkness.

Thus begins the autumn, the falling.

May we brace, take that deep breath that comes

before the starter fires his gun,

and face tomorrow with open arms

and defiant mouths.

Stolen Cherries

My tongue twists itself

into laurel wreaths, speaks

of victory even as it tastes defeat:

grand optimist. Knows it cannot win every battle it fights.

The scent of blood as my teeth drive stakes into my cheeks -

“Check your words before you speak,” they say.

My lungs breathing life, death and all between

into the chaos of this life I lead, I

feel my pupils dilate,

my heart beat palpatate,

fists clench, fight or flight and I do

neither.

Cannot run from whatever this feeling is,

cannot fight it either.

Every word I choose is picked, carefully;

like cherries blooming red from trees we do not own,

we gather them, share them, and I

stain my fingers the same colour as hers

even as we lick them clean,

pick the flesh of them from our own -

their seeds, bones, far too easy to swallow.

Like words. Like love, like

far too easy to cover up.

But it never stays hidden for long.

Bury the seeds and the trees will grow -

hide a secret and she will know, you know

she knows you too well to hide anything for too long.

Why would this be any different?

You speak of courage, tongue dripping with irony;

tell others to chase love no matter the futility

whilst you hide and try to forget it.

Tell yourself it isn’t fair to ask,

to chase what may not even be there to catch.

Tasting defeat, too afraid to try and ask if victory

is even an option.

Headwinds

The wind is singing

in the language of my fear;

it howls, long note, mourning drone, rattles the glass.

It is keeping me awake.

I watch the minutes tick by, listen

to the silence press tinnitus into my eardrums,

wonder whether, if ever tonight,

I will get some slumbering respite.

I doubt.

The wind is powerful. It does not knock gently

on the inside of my eyes, it

rages. My eyes are mere mirror - thus begs the question

what came first? The wind in my head

or the wind that I watch rip trees from their roots,

close bridges, turn rivers into rapids and seas

into seething cesspools.

Which came first?

Did I stare into the abyss and become what I could see,

or did this world look inside me,

and decide to show everyone else the turmoil…

the raw, unbidden emotion, the power of such love,

and hatred, exhaustion and fear

in equal measure.

Storms have a terrible tendency to destroy so much… and if,

God forbid,

when my mother named me, she named a storm,

I pray to whatever God presided,

do not let me lose that which I love

through my own misguided, fatal follies.

Optimism

She wears the night over her head,

it is the cowl that shields her face from the world.

It drifts to her shoulders, smooth curtain - this dark

is one I do not fear when I look into it,

not when it’s her;

eyes sparkling with her smile,

brighter than all the sky full of dead stars waiting to fall,

still impersonating life even in their death.

I watched her do that once.

It is the only time she has ever frightened me.

She has a crescent moon tattooed behind

her right ear. The night

whispers to her, spins her stories of the world’s truths

and she has learned them. Learned to see

the crescent moon as half full,

instead of half empty.

It’s hard to write when your head and your heart are not singing in tandem: my chest is full of birdsong, but the lightness of the sound is so weighted - a tonne of feathers weighs no less than a tonne of lead. My mind drifts, seesaw between heavy rock and melancholy piano: nerves, electric, pulsing, anatomy of gritted teeth, but the mind weeps, quietly, aching almost to the point of sweetness. Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe my head and heart are both too badly broken to make a sound; my body, a dreamcatcher become a story too full of plot holes to hold itself together, to even make sense. Maybe they are in tandem with their silence. And I am still left to find nothing.

- Tandem

Arrhythmia

To need holding sometimes does not mean

that you are without strength.

Just as mountains need bedrock foundations

as trees need soil to safeguard their roots

as oceans need tides

everything in this world walks to the rhythm

of a holding. A pulse.

All the words of my unwritten poems

stretch across the vast caverns of my conscious and subconscious mind,

syllables jumping between neurons like kids playing jump-rope

and like kids playing jump-rope

some of them trip and fall and

I cannot always gather the ones that do not land

fast enough not to lose them.

The words tumble, lost, through my throat,

past my sternum,

they settle in my chest and they burn there,

waiting to be found.

They do not burn quietly either.

Like the emotions I harbour that go without saying,

they scald my flesh where they lie and I

swallow the smoke.

Too content to walk to the two-step beat of comfort,

of safety,

can’t bring myself to break out into something more

unknown, more “avant garde”. My love is not

a quiet thing, not if you know

what that rhythm sounds like,

or looks like.

Assassins

It takes specific circumstances

and a very precise strike from a practiced hand

to kill a shadow.

Shadows love to linger -

they’re the bastards that’ll stab you in the back

whilst you’re basking in the sun - just when you think

the battle is won, they’ll fucking draw blood. They’ll cut you,

leave short work of you behind where you used to stand,

solidly, before you realise the first slash has landed:

by the time you realise what’s happening,

there won’t be anything left but a blown-away chalk outline

and a non-existent body bag,

because the shadows aren’t the things that kill you.

Damn wraiths will try and turn you shadow-man,

change your name to ghost -

they will strip you of every inch of the light you hold

if you let them. They will make you kill yourself

if you let them.

It is that light that kills them first. I know

it gets low, so low that the blue of the flame

is all but invisible. Hold it close. Feed it what you can - it’s hard, I know,

but find fuel, keep it close to your body

so your hands don’t shake so much,

keep it safe from the wind those shadows will call up.

Speak - shadows thrive on quiet so be as loud as you can.

And when the time comes,

and your flame has grown from match strike to flint spark to bonfire,

that it covers you, shield against that which would destroy you,

those shadows will be too afraid of the light to even come close,

let alone touch you.

But remember to feed your flames,

because those bastards love to linger,

and if they see you burning out they will have you.

And they will turn you shadow-man.

And they will have you change your name to ghost.

They will strip you of every inch of the light you hold,

if you let them.

So hold on, and hold on tight.

All At Sea

There’s a storm brewing out there,

in the dark of periphery.

I can taste the spray, feel the wind,

smell the breath of the beast as it comes…

My mind is all at sea;

my anxiety comes in waves arching

twenty feet or more and I am alone

trying to steer my broken boat back

to some semblance of a harbour:

She’s got a cracked hull and split sails

trying to fly on a halved mast. The beast

is hungry for more than my ship can feed it.

Her anchor is sunk far beneath the depths

content only to steady what sand it settles in whilst I

battle to keep my head above water.

Sometimes these storms get so dark, the wind

gets loud that every wave sounds like hounds baying

for your blood. And if the beast has marked you

for death by drowning how can you outrun it

when there’s nowhere to hide.

The oceans are where storms are born after all…

but also almost always where they die.

I can’t remember dawn now, though I try.

I know daybreak will split the sky - the sun

will come. I’ve just got to ride out the night.

The beast is not unbeatable.

I’ve watched him cower, heard his whimpers as I have forced him back.

I don’t feel it in my clenched teeth, but my bark

is stronger than his bite.

I know this.

And for a while, the howling does not seem

quite so loud.

There is all of this grief you are carrying

and all of the grief I am carrying

and we meet and fall in love

but neither of us knows where to put all this grief

so we let it spill all over each other,

let it colour our edges like soot and smoke

that slowly finds its way into our mouths

and neither of us knows where the fire is,

yet here we are in ashes, in ashes,

holding each other and saying,

it will be all right.

It will be all right.

-Nikita Gill