i never write people’s names in my poems.

this way i can recycle old bodies
stacking you up against
endless metaphors of others.

this way i can remember new bodies
re-written over lines i have already read

lines i have already read.

(and i wait here
just beneath

that which

holds you open:

like sheets of paper
laid out across your stomach,
like palms).

this way i can keep my days calm
and separate

between the borders of these
little white pages

surprising myself
with the way every letter every word
every letter every word

somehow appear the same.

he said:
all my last chapters
have already been written for me.

we were crouched behind poker machines,
the mirrored walls spinning
like disco balls.

he said:
this is the saddest pub i’ve ever
been to…

and i’ve been to adelaide.

we smoked cigarettes until
our throats bled
and talked about friends we don’t
see anymore.

(i knew all along
how this would turn out).

there was poetry on our
television set

i was trying to think
of something to say.

i think freud would think i’m still stuck in the oral stage
i just want you in my mouth i want to suck you like a cigarette

inhaling in

the time it takes

as i take you in.

my house smells of amyl
and the fridge buzzes
like the pain in the back of my neck.

all of these nightmares
happen in surround sound

and i spend all night
in strangers arms,
trying to find my way back
to your embrace.

-invisble before me-

he touches my face
and my feet
and i am burning at both ends.

my skin accumulates genocides
like dust on a window sill

your face is a polaroid developing backwards in my brain

another morning waking up in the body i am destroying

-he comes apart-

i put my hand in your pocket
and you say nothing

which is exactly what i want to hear.

if i were to have a love affair
with bukowski
i would have to call myself
“woman”

& he would devote himself
to my empty beer bottles & dirty underwear.

somewhere between my palms
& the dawn
a filthy child would be born

whose little limbs
would cast shadows of guilt and apathy
across our stale sheets.

all night long
sex & death
would ring out from our bed

& in the morning

my skin soaked with words

he would whisper flaty to the back of my head

get the hell out of my house.

not even the sirens that scrape
at my window
can touch me now

i am blessed by an illness
without
cause or cure.

i have executed a plan
to collapse time
with these words.

meaning will exist only without

your body lingers on mine
like a shadow
your skin closing in

an apostrophe

punctuating the distance between us

a comma, lacing together pieces
of your absence

and you breathe in & out & in & out
here

where i feel the ellipsis…eclipse us.

i wanted to put
2 words together

that had never
been put
together before.

i asked if you thought
it was possible
to find a new combination

& you said

maybe you have to invent a new language.

so i wait for you
outside of words

listening as your breath
pushes up against the air

& echoes

back

to me.

our poems
are written on the back of pay slips

we spend all morning
arguing about revolution
only to decide that it is time to eat lunch

i take a trip to chinatown
& feel my skin dissolving
in a neon language

when i get home
you ambush me at the kitchen table
with a mouldy toothbrush
& tell me stories
about eating acid
in art galleries

as if hunter s. thompson
knew
more
than i do now

at 2:04am
in a cold bed listening to the sound of apocalypse
in my stomach…

her legs
smell like stale nylon
& thrush

i follow her skirt
through the city
because it makes sense
to me at the time.

you sit outside my window
smoking cigarettes
& swing swing
swinging
your feet:
they make the same sound
as a metaphor
each time they pass.

now you are climbing old
trees in the night
the bark moves like lips
underneath your fingers

kissing each branch
as you reach up

further & further
against the dark.

I turned silences and nights into words.
What was unutterable, I wrote down.
I made the whirling world stand still.

-arthur rimbaud