en media res

• And the woolen dress that clung so tight / To the contours of your body / The dead grass stuck to fibers from us / Rolling in the layby
• Were passed to dog-haired blankets / That protected the back seat covers / And a crucifix was hung from rear-view / Mirror by your mother
• I'm leaving my body to science / Not medical, but physics / Drag my corpse through the airport / And lay me limp on the left wing / Drop me at the highest point / And trace a line around the dent I leave in the ground / That'll be the initial of the one you'll marry / Now that I'm not around
• If you were given the option / Of dying painlessly in peace at 45 / With a lover at your side / After a full and happy life / Is this something that would interest you? / Would this interest you at all?

there are listed buildings

• You dangle fishing line for crabs / But they're not interested / I'm your only bite
• I watched your face move in a compact mirror, how the powder settles in / Premature crows feet, caused by worry / You say I circle you unwanted / Like a seagull swoops and feeds from bin
• There are listed buildings / And woe betide your listed heart / I think I'd do it for love if it were not for the money / I'll take any scraps that you can give
• I remember being naked to my waist, though not in which direction / Oh, I'm a glutton for love, can you give me some romance? I'm a glutton for sin / We are but two atheists in lust / You know, we've gotta make our own love
• I think I'd do it for love if it were not for the money / I'll take any scraps that you can give / I think I'd do it for love if it were not for the money / I'll take any scraps that you can give

romance is boring

• You're pouting in your sleep, I'm waking still yawning / We're proving to each other that romance is boring / Sure, there are things I could do if I was half prepared to / Prove to each other that romance is boring
• Start as you mean to continue / Complacent and self-involved / You're trying not to be nervous / If you are trying at all
• I will wait, I will bake phallic cake / Take your diffidence, make it my club house / But my strengths within lies, ventricle cauterized / It's the way of living that I espouse
• We are two ships that pass in the night / You and I, we are nothing alike / I am a pleasure cruise, you are gone out to trawl / Return nets empty, nothing at all

we've got your back (documented minor emotional breakdown #2)

• Doe eyes, / You're kidding yourself. / I learned remedial Spanish from a toddler. / Passenger seat of father's taxi, / Cussing in unison. / Clutching receipts and deceased handwriting, / Filled with a sense of great disappointment; / Doe eyes, / You're kidding yourself.
• And so fucking on and so fucking forth: / We've got your back, / Whatever that's worth. / If your hero told you to go huff a sharpie, / What would you do? / (I do not know). / Every girl I ever kissed I was thinking of a pro-footballer / (THOUGHT. YOU. SHOULD. KNOW).
• I've learnt more from toilet walls, / Than I've learnt from these words of yours. / Your feelings are buried in scriptures and fictions, / It's all in the words but I'm here for the pictures. / I'm sweating off the cheap notes on my thighs, / They were for your benefit not mine.

plan a

• And now that we are twenty three - days tethered to the running track, / Evenings chained to the dishrack.
• Was it wind? Did it take a bad deflection? / A decade spent nursing a fear that you might never make it?
• I hand them a photograph of you, / The most beautiful thing they'd ever seen.

straight in at 101

• You pull your dress over your face, / And I stare down towards my chest, / Chastise both our greasy hair, / Wonder whose gut is the softest.
• Where I ball my fingers into fists until my knuckles glow bright white, / Press the heels into eye sockets 'til I see the flashing lights. / Stop me when my stories change / When they have started to repeat, / 'Cause last time I was a mess of sleep of icy feet.
• So baby; / All apologies. / It was going to happen, / inevitably.
• I think we need more post-coital / And less post-rock / Feels like the build-up takes forever / But you never touch my cock / And what exactly do you mean now / By "what can you even eat?" / And how does that affect /How I'll get off this evening?
• I've been playing straight chicken with gay girls / It's never enough / She keeps on pulling the peace sign / And it seems like a taunt / She licked a glaze on her lips / They shone like battleship grey / She never liked the wisdom I gave / "Some people give themselves to religion / Some people give themselves to a cause / Some people give themselves to a lover / I have to give myself to goals"
• I condescend a smile and wink directly at the camera. / I leave you led in both our scents as I tip-toe out the backdoor.

who fell asleep in

• She turned her back on the church and put all her faith in me, / At the back of the chapel where I taught her to screw and to blaspheme. / We turned our backs to the church with our trousers around our knees, / While screaming the scriptures, she said I was her favourite heresy.
• In a note I read: "If you should go blind and deaf, / I'll cleanse and I'll bathe you and I'll cook for you daily. / I will take a dry ballpoint pen and trace on your chest / All of the same conversations that we have now in bed". / I don't mean to be selfish, but I think I'd sooner just be dead.
• Behind the tennis court, alongside the river, not a single live flower to see. / This is the one girl who woke up from all that and now falls asleep next to me. / But I swear now, every time that I kiss her, she feels her god breathe on her shoulder. / It pains me, but I'm sure she's still yours.
• She said she wanted a sea burial, not grass and hypodermics to her hips. / I pruned the ivy from your grandmother's tomb, / More tender and careful than the superstitious / Ripped you from your mothers womb.
• In a note I wrote: "I think too much about the end, / But being around it made me feel like I'm coping. / Now when I view the cemetery I don't see headstones, I see / Rows of engraved milk teeth, hungry, waiting for me". / And though I am fearful, I think I just crave the relief.

i warned you; do not make an enemy of me

• Got soul! Got vision! Got mind to leave here.
• I'll take your heart with such little commotion, / By crippling disease or with deadly love potion. / I'll bind you and gag you and all's well that ends, / I suppose.
• Got a call, / Are we not interesting? / Fair to say we are not / interesting at all. / Broke down laughing and screaming for more, / But if this changed your life, / Did you have one before?
• Dermis spread across tiled floor. / A taste on the tongue that you and me both abhor.

i just sighed, just so you know

• First and foremost, / Let it be said, / I am writing this at 7:10am, / On the hard dry tarmac of a vacant forecourt. / Astronomically speaking it's the first day of Autumn, / But the sun is hanging round like summer's hungover. / They'll knock the garage down and build flats where I sit. / The traffic's so persistent it barely registers and it smells like a mix between petrol and dog shit.
• Just let me be the one that keeps track of the moles on your back. / I just sighed, / The universe replied: "Let this pass you by".
• Sometimes it's just enough to know I keep him on his toes. / Is he as sympathetic as me to the untimely demise of your synthetic clothes?
• I've written eulogies in guestbooks at galleries in the hope that you might pass.
• She; / Nervous and barefoot, / Chats to me at the front door. / He; / Boyfriend, / Inside's a saint, becoming a martyr. / Me; / Rolling, / Writhing on the floor, / Stared daggers pulled from my thoracic wall. / When I hold sea shells to my ears I'm pretty sure I can hear you.
• He gave a gift of the Faber book of love poems, / Annotated the ones he thought applied the most.
• I promise after this I will pick up the phone book and choose the name that my eyes fall upon on their first look. / Aim all of my poorly composed declarations there in the future. / I'm so sorry to have put you through a lifetime of dedications that you never desired.
• ...But this one sentence bludgeons me over the head... / I'm a little bit drunk and I mean just a little bit, / No lush in denial, / Only rather coquettish. / I'm fifteen years old and my parents' only son, / Like I barely survived a girls' school education. / Even prettier now that you've grown your hair long, / I'm a slip of a man since I cut mine all off.
• Please just let me be the one to keep track of the freckles and the moles on your back.

a heat rash in the shape of the show me state; or,letters from me to charloette

• She'd bruised so black they watched it fade through the full spectrum of colours. / They kept it like a pet, / A private joke; / They told no others. / And how the tissue repaired, / And how it turned to yellow, / And she found it disgusting 'cause it didn't match her clothing. / He said "that's not yellow, / It's golden".
• Walk out onto your front lawn and face into the rain, / Shout into the wind this'll never be the same.
• They promised they'd be best of friends from now until forever, / But both were far too needy not to fall for the other. / And how the frequent public displays of sisterly affection left her feeling safe, / Left him with an erection.
• Her body barely visible as bleach white as the bedsheets. / As stiff as starched, / Only perceptible as the middle was still branded with a heat rash, / In the perfect shape of the Show Me State. / Your come on lines sound disastrous; / Noise more foreboding than volcano or earthquake
• Letter from me to Charlotte; / "They appropriated everything we ever loved and dressed it up in quotations and fluff. / And I had a dream: / (though said with hand in pocket, / I mean it hand on heart) / You held / a gun to his head,/ Pressed your thumbs to her throat".
• In these letters. / Letters from me to Charlotte

the sea is a good place to think about the future

• I grabbed hold of her wrist and my hand closed from tip to tip / I said, you've taken the diet too far, you've got to let it slip / But she's not eating again, she's not eating again She's not eating again, she's not eating again / I ask her to speak French and then I need her to translate / I get the feeling she makes the meaning more significant / She was always far too pretty for me / To believe in a single word she said, believe a word she said
• At fourteen her mother died in a routine operation / From allergic reaction to a general anesthetic / Spent the rest of her teens experimenting with prescriptions / In a futile attempt to know more than the doctors
• A good place to look to the future is / When you are sat at the sea / With the salt up to your ankles / And a view of the end of the pier / You may look down at your model's feet / And wish that you'd just float away / And the weather here is overcast / And the sea is the same shade of gray / So the landscape before you looks just like the edge of the world / But to the left side and the right side / Either way is a crazy golf course
• The sea is a good place to think of the future / And all you can hear is the sound of your own heart / And all you can feel is your lungs flood and the blood course / But oh I can see five hundred years dead set ahead of me / Five hundred behind, a thousand years in perfect symmetry / A thousand years no getting rid of me / A thousand years in perfect symmetry

coda; a burn in the shape of the sooner state

• Run the water 'til it scalds you, / Know that I'm listening. / Pitter patter runs the shower, / Hits the bare porcelain. / Watch the dirt run down the plughole, / Hear it echo within. / They described you nude in detail, / I knew everything: / An artist's impression of the Manhattan Skyline / And a soon to be burned scar, / In the perfect shape of the Sooner state. / I fall to my knees, / My piss soaked jeans: / The first time, / The last time, / All the times inbetween. / The first time, / The last time, / All the times I would have liked there to have been.
• I can't believe I chose the mountains every time you chose the sea.