i have red teeth

The moon has stumbled to bed,
and I am more awake than a damned casket.

My words have been ground together like Arabica beans, and this is nothing short
of a refresher,
for the last few months have been a wake up call, that has left me reaching, in pain, for the phone.

I am alone now,
boxed into these four walls.
I am attached, but only to my constructs.
I have nothing more to treasure than grainy memories of happiness
in the form of love’s tension
and thinking
I have everything I need to know within a backpack;
that my textbooks about psychology, and philosophy
will some how lead me to read between the lines,
where there is enough space to
draw myself a map towards
home.

There are now four holes in my bag, one near the bottom,
where the cotton flesh has exposed it’s lining,
and there are only so many books its fragility can handle.

I have been branded as fragile.
I can’t hold a bottle of wine and a social setting together without unearthing ways to pick apart the petals of March’s wild flowers
with absolute certainty
of discarding the second last
‘I love you not’.

Your words have left me tender, your actions, in pieces.
I have torn myself into two’s and four’s and seven’s.
Each limb’s laceration, like the pages of my unlikely tragedy,
sounds like the last time you
said ‘I’m leaving’.

I am lost.
My heart beat used to palpitate to a
monotonous heart beat like a metrinome.
I was music.
But I was out of time, four octaves too high, and I could never quite find a
way of saying ‘I need you’.

My body was at mercy, I was crucified with a kiss by your door step,
and now,
all I want back are the words I gave to you.

We are the damaged goods, we are the cracked ceramics,

We are the lovers, the carvers, the fighters, and to our beloveds, but figments.
We are nothing.

But we are condemned to these mistakes, and we must
fight for more reasons, to love and to carve and to be
more than damaged goods;
to be music again.

I know I’ve fought hard to just breathe without your name
swimming in my heavy April breath,
but you’re barely worth a memory
and I will make myself forget.