expressing feelings in ink

Collection: responses to space struck

I think I was made to bleed on love's jagged edges I have always lived full-throated, jumping before I knew how to be afraid There's a perverse pleasure in the dripping blood that paints stories on my skin The red running and staining Until it's wiped away Visible only if you care to look Sometimes it's my own fault I look at the hilt in his hand, the dagger glinting Take his hand in mine And drive the blade home

It was never meant to be a lie, either Just a fact untold until it became a secret, something you kept Until slowly it morphed into a willing deception You bit into the fruit and saw the freedom you could have You thought it had been freely given But the tree was poison and you found yourself fleeing, falling Forgotten before you could spill your truth Held inside your chest Until it was cracked open Set free

The future is bright and golden and it lives in the curve of your brow, the strength of your jaw Glittering and light and so unlikely that it might as well be fiction No one ever loves and stays Love is always in the leaving Love can't survive in place, static I look up at you, on the crest of the hill Your wind tousled hair obscuring your face Your outstretched hand just out of reach As you stand, without me On the brink of forever

We loved as only children can Reckless, open, sure Our days spent climbing trees and scaling bunk bed ladders and not for a second thinking that fate could ever end our quiet childhood But we weren't bound for Neverland, and our growing up was inevitable When I next saw you, you were a man, and so was I Used to cutting ourselves open with the knives we had used to prepare dinner Blood dripping on wooden floors Veins open, heavy, full Emptying Sitting atop the red stains, multiplying in rings as we added our glasses, long drained of cherry red As I kissed you goodnight, and dreamt of the children we had been

This city makes me feel at home, but fragmented The parts that make me up split across time A pandemic year, a post uni panic, a depressive haze This city the only constant 17, 5, 10 21, 24, 26 How old do I get to be here? How much of an adult or a child? Am I meant to shatter and crack harder each time? Is breaking open the cost of this freedom?

Sometimes I wonder whose bones are buried beneath these floors Whose phantoms haunt the halls when the lights are out and the house is quiet Sometimes I feel like I was built to join them Walking through the world, dreamlike and hazy, disconnected Functioning best in the hours when the city sleeps and I can see my breaths in the cold air I feel in between life and death But with a clarity that daylight never brings I want to haunt the halls of every place I have ever cried My footsteps echoing in the places my sobs rang out All that's left of me, my breaths in the cold night air