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But you know this sap of a tune better then I,

Dearest, cherished, sweetest - fine ornaments a

Farcical prelude to the cacophony of our togetherness,

The only thing that ever changes is the rhythm.

How soon you'll tire of an old yarn respun,

How easily you find a broken pet amusing once more.

Your gaze betrays insatiable. I bow at your call.

"What is this then?" And you laugh sardonically at my reply,

A hound to a lyre, I return and beweep the cause.

Who strums the tune and who follows?

Blinded, I wander the death of your childhood home.

I sing the world a lonely echo, hollow in a full room,

And I greet Narcissus, beautiful, wearing your face.

This is how it ends, isn't it. How it always ends.

I bring you back to our world of the living,

Just to lose you all over again. Willingly, you go.

You, my living Eurydice: I will lose you always.

And I, your Orpheus, will never wait to turn back.

But here you remain, amidst grief, alive.

Unfortunate, perhaps.

In the beginning of all things, I look back.

You had never followed. Never thought to listen.

So bitterly, as it were in your love, I wish:

Eat a pomegranate, lover.

Stay with Death a little longer.

Like a song sung upon the jilted radio,

"Love" now follows the decay of yellow paper,

The frayed edges cutting past the parchment mesh

And I am left with but a few words of your solace,

But I carve it out anyway. Your face, your hands,

I dream the remains into storms of love, dear love.

I feel your absence more keenly than the passing of time.

By the time I memorise the alphabet in the shape of your hand,

My hands would have lifted off the pen from paper,

Stealing away the ink with besmirched fingers,

And leaving behind the corruptive traces of wear.

A letter transforms by omission, and I resent.

When can I see you? And the paper replies:

And around your bare legs. Bare. The flesh of it.

Water. Irregular. Splotchy, pools down

The skin that tapers off into nubs of toes and fingers,

Follicles too evident against the white-plastered tub

And so thick. Pudgy. Malformed with prematurity,

Obscene. Even the word is a clumsy pop of a syllable.

Your hands wander upwards, scrubbing across the expanse like a false lover,

Cleaning yourself, or atoning, while the distinct stench of soap water

Cuts. Sears at your eyes. You can feel the roll of flesh,

The pull at your joints, a jaw set tight against ground teeth in your anger,

It's too much. Too heavy a form for such light a mind.

Just think: think, for a moment.

The layers of tissue and then the blood. The muscles.

The murky fluids and then the stringed nerves, miniscule,

Then bones and bulbous organs that fatten up and creak,

You won't see them. You cannot envision their disease.

You cannot cleanse a living spine, after all.

Nothing will ever cure you of this, nothing.

Raise yourself, the shower floor is no baptism,

The mechanism of your form deserved no such pity.

Just repent. Atone. Bash the body into a pulp of self-annihilation.

The showerhead is off and you've been kneeling for nearly the last half an hour.

The face that jeers back from the smokey mirror doesn't wear your face.

Feel it. The skin. The water. The dirt that clings.

And once you blink,

Every waking morn, when you wish and beg for silence,

Through every sacred moment that is yours,

Yours and yours alone, now ours,

To remind you of me with it, the clock, the bird,

The passing of endless, ceaseless time

- there will be joy. I learn this like street-market gospel.

The days pass: I feel the cogs beginning to wear,

Love, please, must you leave so soon?

My days are shrouded in wood and desolation,

Eb minor, Bb minor, A, Bb major

You aren't back. Where are you? Where?

My spring throws me against an unyielding wall,

But your own door swings wide like a cuckoo's,

My wooden cage soft across the skin of your hold,

And my bird's chirp invites you as you smile.

Good morning, greetings! How long has it been?

But I'm awake for only the ha' minute chortle,

Before I'm rushed back. Alone. For the rest of your forever.

Beloved, I say, though you cannot hear the chime of my whistle,

Do not shun me. Do not let me rot and fester, I beg.

I will sing another song. Another tune. Another time.

A clock like me is worthless if it is never read.

I see your anger. How? How? I sung, you cannot be angry,

No. You're not. This is what you asked me for.

Don't hurt me. There cannot be an end to us.

I am a bird and I mustn't break. I don't want to.

Beloved, you're not even looking. Why?

My hands snap by the joints as I am butchered by floorboard.

I blink and then the table appears before me with its pen,

Wordless, they echo nothing of a world beyond the moment.

Pen. Ink. Table. Man. Chair.

Like a child in forced prayer, I repeat their names,

I deny them and the world to escape.

The paper remains and I must do something.

The hollowness begs to be human.

And so, feverishly, my pen carves out each limb and organ,

Covering every incision with intent that belongs to God's scalpel,

Until a shrewd vision of a life is doodled upon it.

And, as I sigh upon it, the eyes I've omitted blink as it breathes.

A name, tell me a name. I cannot bear this.

I start again. The room is clinical as it bears down in blues,

Heaven singes downwards with a fluorescent lightbulb

And I am alone. Drawing. Carving out blind purpose in this.

If I were human, my self alone would have sufficed,

But I am stuck. Observed by the heed of shame.

The trial ends with the last page, torn as I fail under visionless scrutiny,

Leaving behind only the finely arranged mechanism of organs,

That lacked the heart and indefinable soul to inhabit it.

Veiling them with shrouds of each other's skin, I turn my people, my selves, away.

My? What authority makes them mine?

The world echoes divine horror as I am led out,

Eyes turned upon me in disappointment and then away with disgust,

And, like the welling of tears within a storm, the realisation wakes:

I merely had to draw the man who had just been in the room.

And, in feeble response, I had drawn nothing human at all.

In the cold of spring, we wait for the next bus.

My gaze follows the plumes of your huffing complaints.

"20 minutes!" You scowl with a turn on your heel,

Dragging me down the path home by foot instead.

I grasp your hand so that we don't stop running.

It is beautiful, don't you think?

When I think of life, I am chasing you down the road,

My world is a tree-lined Tuesday drowned in pointless delays.

It is proof I live in the moments that don't matter.

That I am alive, that it is meaningful to live,

I sit beside you as you count your breath,

Watching the rise of your chest as you heave in,

Scraps of oxygen hugging into your soul.

Your body slows, pausing, closing into itself, while

Fossil-like, the ammonite of your body cools.

Your shell a back stripped bare with rotten lashes.

Like the enveloping of stale wind, I cradle your form,

Your heart paces as if tearing through its sinews to chase death,

And so I sit with you, with Death. And so I speak.

I bring you birdsong, the stars, the multitude of light,

To your silent decay, I tell you my life. Yours.

I give you a dream that dotes upon your sighing breath.

You wake soon after. Scrubbing yourself clean of

The world. The scorching tar that clings your throat.

Your room is back to bare, a coffin now just wood,

And you kneel as you choke on an act half done.

Like a mother, the pitiless moon watches your silent penance,

Your hands are warm even as I hold them.

Child, beloved, o' scornful blister of my life,

You must allow yourself love, warmth, to rest and hate,

You are as righteous as wrong and I love you.

In death, you will not be alone.

In life, you must live with your self. You.

No knife will dull your pain.

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{A/N: greetings, this is slightly atypical to my usual poems but I needed to add a notice to inform you all of some recent changes. If it was not clear, I have recently attempted suicide and, as is obvious, have survived. I intended to delete this account before attempting , but plans had to change. Since I'm still alive for the time being, I still rely on this blog for support. I will take down the notice soon and I thank you for your patience.

The rot of the world is slow,

It fills your room like fine layers of dust sedimenting-

Breath stifled and quashed with the air, suffocated.

No-one notices that they've fossilised.

The human body too is not made for this inertia,

The rotation of the earth while it stands still:

Waiting, lounging, breaking apart.

You'll wake and realise you're not yourself anymore.

Your body will be bones of someone else,

You'll wake with the stuttered heartbeat of a dead person,

A person who you swore was breathing up until

You woke.

To ease this ache, you return the body back.

It's settled in it's dated layers, sunken and charred,

The gaze of empty eyes shutting once more.

At ease, it is easier to sleep.