Wishlist/ Recipe for Fixing Broken Hearts.

When I paint you
I will paint you with colours
As raw as wild flowers
And I will tell you things like
'I miss you.
And what comes between us is not distance
Or vacant conversation
But time.'

If you ever let colours disintegrate into
All sorts of potential powders
Imagine for a second that you are synaesthetic
And the powders aren't a mish-mash of potentials
But each a distinct feeling washing over you
And for once,
Please don't escape heartbreak.
Let it sink in.

Let the potentials of the future
Fueled by the dwindling possibilities of the past fill up that crater
At the centre of your heart.

No, feel the crater first
That is the deadening, semi-silence
That each heartbeat trips over.
Let that crater spread through all of you
Although if the diagnosis reads 'heartbreak',
You won't even have to
Before you try each colour.

Try the sex, the brown, the chocolate, the red, the clothes, the blue, the weight-gain, the green,
The weight-loss, the mauve, the tears, the black, the cigarette, the grey, the music, the goddamn rainbow
Spectrum, neon, RBG, primary, secondary,  disco damn light
Try every colour pulled apart and fed to yourself
Try hunger, try thirst, try travel.
Try rebound.
Try each colour until you know
That if I left you in a room
Raw with the smell of all wild flowers
You will feel like
Deja Vu.
Colourless, colourful deja vu.

Lick pain, in all its lemony-yellow, like
An ice cream flavour that seems too
Spunky to try.
Let it dissolve on your tongue
And numb it, momentarily.
Then try a little more, before you know
You can taste all of it
And finish a whole damn scoop of it.
Graduate to a tub.
Pass the pain test with flying colours.

And then, for once, dampen your hair
Like it was a paint brush
And wring it tightly.
Watch as each one of those potential powder colours drains out
In the colourlessness of water.
No one will see it like you do
No one will see that you emptied out
the goddamn rainbow
Spectrum, neon, RBG, primary, secondary,  disco damn light.

Feel a different emptiness,
Like emptying out a crater.
And carefully, prise the crater shut.
And breathe, just so that
This time, when you hear your heartbeat,
It isn't tripping.

Kiss yourself a matte-red lipstick imprint.
And make yourself a wishlist using
Wax crayons.
Make a list of every heartbreak in
Past
Present
Future
Potential
And repeat process.

Are You Gonna Stay the Night?

Hi, you.
I have a dream for us
That involves having laughed so loud
That we could stick our tongues out
To taste the air
And we'd feel that light twinge of blood
And smoke
That laughter tastes like.

And because that's not funny at all,
I have a dream for us
That involves us laughing even more.

And because we were just laughing,
I have a dream for us that
We fall, staggering, on the bed
Without all that conventional music
And create our own kind of
Hit-head-against-the-edge-of-the-bed
Static.

And I have a dream for us
That even when we are silent and
There is nothing beautiful except the night
You whisper something irrelevant just when
You could have said something like
'This moment is quasi-permanent.
So, I love you, in all our temporariness.'
But I have a dream for us
And that is all about imperfect lines
Because if you said the perfect one
It would kill the quasi-permanent midnight sky
And damn, I hope you say it is more beautiful than either you or I
Because the moment you climbed that train of hyperbole
I'd get off, because for someone who eats stars up with her eyes
I'd know stories die
When you try to make them outlast time.

And I have a dream for us
That involves me saying it's my only joint ever
And you laugh condescendingly
And I laugh superficially and tell you that you are trying to destroy
A virginity
And you say it isn't you who will fuck me over
But a collective, generic, Generation-specific we.
Because I would like to believe that somewhere in the span of laughter and smoke
We developed a similarity
That will leave a (w)hole
When there is nothing left to us
But
My dreams
Of one night stands
And what they shouldn't be.

Psychosocial Stage 5

The sky was ashen.
You do not particularly need
A window placed just right
To detect the broken pulse
Of an oppressive sky.      

The static gets to me because
I have known more sounds at the
Brink of the night            
And I have slept to the sound of a whirring fan
As though it was a calming lullaby.

But have we known enough to
Sit still without a single thought
Of static breaking the very singular soul
We have devoted our whole lives into pretending?


I have not known good graces
Or learnt yet how to fully remember faces
Because I would not be able to
Recall what the shine of eyes speak of
Or what the curve of a jawline
Absolves itself of.
All I have are vagaries
And vague impressions oppressing me. 

Pencil Outlines

They said it would be the real-est real reality could really be.
So I waited and waited and wrote a letter
That I left unfinished
Because the wait stripped me of commitment.

It was now, and now, and now
And just a little more.
It was ten minutes
And nearly there
And Shut Your Mouth.

Just when I was completely spent.
It happened then
Like a mistake, a fountain not a jet  
Between your legs
Like a folly, not a full sky,    
But some twilit bereavement
Like a skyscraper that has risen
In anticipation of its own incline
Like the metal scaffolding
That stood like a hanger against the skyline.

It wasn't enough.
Whatever the built it to, it wasn't enough.              
They painted Older like some classical shot at beautiful  
And when it came down to me,
I was given pencil outlines.