it's a desperate love like we should stay calm, it's blood through my teeth when i touch your hand, it's a song that moves like a knife, and i am bad under this midnight.

i wanted you to say hello but you were a trick of bludgeoning, treating me like warm skin and thief.

this could be so different but it is all i might remember, a flight of bastard animals, a bee sting for my heart.

i have got these organs driving wrong, something long awry. i will fall asleep with a monster in the yard, a charm in my head.

(clockwork, sweeping tongue, click of deep water, reptile sweat.)

shake it out.

my words have fallen down again. so i go about as an insect or as death that gathers the world up in its furs, what fury and want, only natural if not to decay. the want for lightning to split the room, for chalices of flesh to empty, the dawn that strikes on flame. or love or grip or vast or great. yes, i want such a simple boundless thing.

but i remain and continue, and as i do, your hope is yet boundless, too. but we never touch, we never speak, we never know just how close our broken rooms have become. cheap paint hides your name, cracked light takes my smile.

i never know.

casting lines

you know what I mean

all of it is still.

this is the last year or so, as fallen behind and discarded. drafts that i give life to, tonight.

I.

If they knew (if they knew, if they knew, if they knew!) how it is. Happiness – no – blinding heat – no, it was – happiness. And I want them all torn apart, all close and here.

I can't stop. I need to be at the gym.

HAPPINESS

He is just so damn...

HEAT

II.

some day all your pain builds as monuments, and some days it's all just seething colour, the kind of colour that eats at other colour, stripping away cheeks and kneecaps, or too much, filling all of your eyes, the whole of your stomach, a bloated painting that once held a simple smile.

i still can't hold a thought.

but yesterday, it was all a monument.

III.

and i race myself to this side again, so far away from the spark that carries me, and even the libraries have died.

IV.

i think it's more than writing, more than any one thing, and maybe any one of those things are the unetched notes to the same song, just such a lost thing, cracked pavement thing, dripping from a bent tree.

V.

and you will never deserve, if you see only skin, and your skin never deserved, the poison they mapped.

VI.

press your song to my teeth, kiss me like granite.

VII.

every day can't show itself for another colour, not drip through your bones.

VIII.

because this moment might feel so close, and this day feel so...

IX.

and then your lips, there was a knife, sudden teeth.

X.

i taste your stomach and knot my teeth, i am a bit confused who...

XI.

i have to believe. i do believe. i believe. i can't be sad because i will drown in it. every day is a fight sometimes.

XII.

but it's raining now, how it clings to the branches of the dead tree, entire worlds passing quietly in moments, and the curtains give before the light. my feet find each other and make promises, a simple warmth or secret, that headphones rewire the horrors, with a beautiful song.

XIII.

these dominoes i planted to the soil, they never grew.

XIV.

i can still feel the movie scene, my mug, your lips, you in a smile like the cold air.

XV.

you pierce my lip with a kiss, run a trigger right under my skin.

XVI.

your eyes are the sun, i'm moving to remove my wings.

XVII.

they never tell you that you will end up this far away, this far removed and scratching at adjectives. that you'd become so innumerously alone, when the coin flips to its poor axis, and you just can't change it, pockets full of blood.

XVIII.

there's meant to be something great and small, to cleave all of this into two.

XIX.

you always stood alone, always crushed beneath your throne, even in the...

XX.

sound the drum! there's this amassing force within me, that soon, i will...

XXI.

i always thought the colours of the world kept the sky pinned to its sleeve, but it was always friendship.

XXII.

i'm always just waiting for the world to kickstart, for something amazing to spark up. the sun is so bright, and you are filled with that newest brim of hope. and i guess i just recall the stories of the paths, and how they go.

XXIII.

stumble until you are living–ingest.

XXIV.

press my face into the sheets, then rip plants from the soil.

XXV

You know, just have a good life. Don't darken yourself with graves, the throws of crumpled knaves. Spill your mistakes, Send a canary into all of their goddamned dark.

XXVI.

I don't know where to stop, where is safe. and I don't want these fucking abstractions, I want first person, I want real. I don't want to be a fucking writer. I just want to feel, and write that down. I don't want it to be pretty, for your eyes to pass through those mists, to get to there. These weeks, are pained.

Everything went to shit after he left, or the feeling that sparked up there. Being in love, you know.

XXVII.

maybe i need more lists. either way, i want to do it my way. i want it to be enough, more than enough. i want it to move things. i can get there, stunted and shitty.

XXVIII.

this game we play, chaser to the mistakes we take, swallowed by the dawn, in stages, blurring out the hands, and I, glow in the dark, stapled by a page.

XXIX.

what if we are assigned a focus, and we meet those parameters, then we are finished. i know it's bleak, but what if it was our purpose. we were simply meant to meet.

XXX.

it's funny how quickly colours can change in a few hours, how strongly a person can paint our days. which is the purpose of my project, so it's nice to see the idea is solid and true. that, sometimes we just need the smallest thing.

XXXI.

don't speak, least you breathe little anchors into the world.

XXXII.

I really don't like how some people will cling to hate, that yellow life raft, sprung out from sadness.

XXXIII.

tonight, we don't give a fuck. we've got a few more hours of sunlight, even under the moon. let's just be, here. we've got our hopes and our pockets and our unshakeable hysteria. we are just plastic cups and fingers on pulses.

XXXIV.

i won't speak, i won't make a sound. i'll just wait up all night, and hope that you come.

XXXV.

so, winter sneaks up on you, tugs at your sleeve, claims you for the night. darkness is a precarious divide, between burning life and staring through walls.

no more walls

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

Anaïs Nin

withiner

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche.

farfire

but my breathing super-heats

and I am a flameflower cast inwards

everything keeps trying to cripple you

and you stand to defy

the defiance is tiring

sad and short and small

and so alone

but so bright.

warm water hands

"Maybe we thought we stopped, like some great trick of the magnets that hold our flesh to these words, and these days to our bones, and our hopes always a little further ahead—still looking back over its shoulder, still making eyes and taking our hands in warm water. I thought we surely had stopped. There was that rumbling low and my chest dribbling grease. There was you, some curvature of moons, that I might collapse into, turn flesh without flesh, and smiles stripped and arcing, of pulsing whiteness and upturned. But it had not stopped, and these arms strike as not comets, and my cracks don't inflict your—those smart eons. So I turn as the Earth, and am some light behind but great future."

Ian William L.

this heat

the thick of heat is upon us now. you were always questions, now the answers steals your blood, mountains so deep in your form, moth bile or headache or some far place dripping from those bones. you fill with fear, damp and rotted, wider eyes across the waters that will reap, and you come to nothing. it is dizzying, all those cavernous sunks, and revolting flesh, of skins, of stretching out and peeling away and hot blood and close, jarring, circular, world scorching bones and screams and wraps and greens, all slaughtering and warm, candles on veins, on old leather. night fur, spastic violent tic, breath clung, heaved in acid, halloween sweat, drink your body back.

for flux

it is just sometimes everything catches you, and everything runs you, to the ground, colours, and heat, and sweat.

and all you can do is think the same hot triggers, and feel the same heart rash, and say the same bent monuments.

the tape that won't allow any space to lick your wounds, the floor that lopped your feet off, the wall where you hang yourself from a light switch and manufacture planets.

THERE SHOULD BE BIG LETTERS THAT BEAR THE WARNING

for he caught a train, and what still grinds into his skull.

for your smile stirs want.

THERE SHOULD BE

I want you, but am safe goods.

breathers since

"One day I will catch a breath thrown for you, and tame you with these lungs."

Ian William L.

it's okay because we're not through existing just yet.

it seems impossible to think, that we've stood here before, and now my trees fall to gravity, your blood scratches my cheek. you stand a wanton moon, of vicious grace, with impossible love...

our sunlight

this kind of sunlight that makes everything fall quiet, just the warmth and the birdsongs. it is a peacefulness, and I wish the train were not to arrive.

my happiness was always going to be too big, my love for the world always too big, so there are vulnerabilities that hold its hand. but i know is that kindness is my favourite thing and making someone else smile. the other only thing i know is the electric war sticking in my head. and with these two moons it might seem that i say and think and feel the same things in constant jolting film lining the walls, filling my room, painting holes for better things to fall through.

but sometimes you have to face your fears and how...my greatest fear of saying a single word you might know, that you might catch or judge or hate or taste.

i am incapable, but i can. if you realise your sadness is growing and the electricity has grown seething,

enough.

I have a job that I eighty five per cent like. And that's the beauty of work, you always have people fall into your life who are genuinely amazing and keep you smiling in such a place of tether. It feels like another family and I want that they are always happy, especially behind the sheen and veneer. I will receive two weeks away from work in the Christmas period and as the new year comes grinning right through me. I will also hopefully be in america. this could be like a movie.

but the main idea that if things are making you sad or angry or hurt then you should do your best to change them. your hand holds the surest aim if you draw the bow.

everything always changes but i will change it now.

nighthurts

and—fuck—how it is so badly that I want to make everything, beautiful, and okay.

but the black hole approaches now and i have left myself with little defense or weight to stand against it. I know all things done can be undone and all things unmade will soon be made, but this is space and time at the reins, and soon i will forget.

lose in this smile

When I know they are all loved, and they are all happy, and they are all safe—I can lose myself in this smile, just give myself to its infinite arc.

I miss it too

smiles, sunsets, the warmth of breathing. movements in the dark, whispers in the cold, quiet endless beauty. fingers gently across foreheads, coffee and odd socks, toothpaste and jackets. wooden floorboards, huddled in couches, a closeness before dreams. faces turned away, and downcast eyes. hands in the sky, grass and feet and clouds. trickling across book pages, crawling in yellowed glows. the morning coming through those curtains, the solid realisation of skins, the colour of shoulders in the morning, and tangled sheets, and bad hair. spilling secrets, waiting forever.

closer,

It's true, to some extent, but I think it goes to the same vein as the rarity of the brilliant thing. we're always colliding and coming so close to things that feel so loudly like the truth, but then just can't be, but, again, this endless collapse leads to such appreciation and awe for the resonance to come.

don't worry. you are a fathomless soul, and that depth heralds discoveries yet still to flow.

she's wearing my shoes and maybe this is endless, my headphones crack like some sudden horizon, some spark of grace.

I thought of you at this point

I need an editor to build my arm back into its socket. I need a cloud to trick the stars and attics. I would crash my car into the stone wall of your spine, peel your layers from my teeth. I need you to believe in candles, so ugly with your truths, that might listen to blood noses. I need you to want the taste of songs I don't sing, trembling like a leaf.

nothing flux

"We're only breathing to help the trees. I am only ragged, that keeps you clean."

Ian William L.

i've had a few days to retreat, like that is all i remember from before. run whenever you draw close, come apart whenever you get started. and as i do, i can feel the magic hang itself in the air. maps bleeding into each other, thicker than the last, pulling wings from flies like you left me.

i can't force it. i can't do a damn thing.

or i stand up, yell defiance, kindness in hand and knives under the skin. because every moment draws its own rules and requirements, and your form must follow.

i got close and you crushed me. you leaned in on my breathing and i set you aglow, spitting love.

i close my eyes and your moth light remains.

speech