We love you fighting,
fists up all dull eyed,
we love you still, spitting
life out like fire breath,
to thaw our skin,
tell us home is a fireplace
and you are sticking
your hand right in
to feel its warmth.

Beauty torn,
Beauty spinning,
In my minds eye,
Shaking form, metamorphic,

Rolling back into the sky,
Heaving body, admittance,
Heavenly creatures, heavenly,

Apparitions to be beloved,
We believed,
Hold me close, like I’m bleeding out in your arms,
Tell me I’m one of the good ones,
That I’ll fly higher than Icarus ever dreamed.

Name the structure,
It is your own skin,
Arms beautiful, obtruding
There’s this old heart,
Eating at the centre,
Shaking, with ecstasy and fear,
I don’t want to be so young,
To endure the spectacle of,
Myself constructed,
A home inside of me,
A whole village, and every inhabitant,
Guilty,
Breaking the sticks off my back,
And standing new,
Unafraid, splinters, dug into soft palms,
Holding the body.

You will never be as lovely as you are now,
Lonely and brushing, your fingers against the rough hands of life,
It’s waiting behind for you despite.

Nothing has ever been so pretty
As sunlight tangled in green leaves
Spreading like fingers
Over the scar of the road
I am not strong
I am not used to love

What’s lived and loved has died as well as you and me,
And dust returns to dust,
Pain is easy,
Moving and alive.

There is a boy in me determined not to live,
Determined to be sick,
He claws and rages against my insides,
My very own soft animal,
I know,
I know,
I know,
What we have is temporary,
And meeting it with the most undying love,
Is the only answer I’ll get,
But he’s hurting me, and god,
Do I want to take a handful,
Of that hair and
Make him understand I have power.
But the boy is me,
And looking in,
At the scene,
All you see is a flailing emulsion of flesh,
Hell bent on purifying itself,
No,
No,
Meeting it all with the most undying love.