You have always been unexpected
Friendship, love the whole lot of it
Leaving you was painful freedom
Still missing you, but I know I can rely on you.
I thought we were on the same page,
I’d have your back always
No matter the passed time.
But I’ve recently learned, so painfully learned- that you don’t have mine.
I used to think you could never surprise me but I never saw this coming
I used to think we’d always respect each other

I guess everything has to change
Things I thought were forever are slipping away
My time is up, my secrets are out
I couldn’t believe they came from your mouth
I thought with everything changing
Our trust would stay the same

I expect the worst from those around me
So the sins against me never surprise me
But with you it was different
I thought you were here to stick
I told you things I’ve never told anyone
You were the closest person to my heart
Loyalty meant so much to you
You know it meant the same to me
I used to think you could never surprise me but I never saw this coming
I used to think we’d always respect each other

But I guess everything has to change
People who I thought were forever are turning away
Safety no more, my secrets are out
I couldn’t believe they came from your mouth
I thought with everything changing
Our trust would stay the same

You’ve outed me to my enemies
In a foolish slip of tongue or with malicious intent,
so unlike you.
Now enemies they circle me and those close to me
Seeking out a weakness which I only let you see.
It was only meant for you and me.


Coming together while I was black and blue
I thought I’d be forever safe with you
I was never once afraid of you

Little did I know you were another wolf dressed in gold,
Summer only as lovers, you’ve brought the winter cold,
You’ve done the only thing that could ever truly **** me.
What have you done to me.

Lucky for you
I take your secrets
Undeservedly
To the grave with me,
Stay away from me
Don’t even lay sunflowers for me.

I wish that I could take it all back
Every secret I shared with you
Every loyalty every memory every vulnerability
Tears running down my cheeks
Sharing breaths under the sheets
Wish I knew in less than a year you couldn’t care
if you betrayed me
if you ruined me
Like only you could hurt me.

You’ve wounded me
You’ve burned me
Beyond repair

Shifting landscapes of us
I am yet to get used to.

How many times have I wandered between
The many “what ifs” and “if onlys” and “I wish’s.”
How many times have I actively slapped my very own hand
When it invariably reaches for you.

The reaching is a selfish hungry thing.
I crave you when I am disappearing.
Even though I loathe how I define myself when I’m with you,
She is better than the unknown
That is chasing and gaping at my heels.

And that isn’t love.

Thirsting after comfort and memories
Thirsting after somewhere to belong
Is not love.

It is hard to admit
It is hard to choose to walk away
Every
Hour
We
Are
Apart.

And that craving
Of how you made me feel
The warmth
The connection
The love
A love I have never seen nor tasted before
A love I did not know how to treat
Is always being denied

And cruel suggestions
And those closest to me doubt my choices
Like they would have any part in the consequences of the choice
I would live with everyday.

I don’t even entertain the white day anymore
I used to spend hours building our life
Stacking our goals into the shapes of home
The mansions in my mind
Were never here to stay

Do I seek a grass of an unattainable green?

I lay in the dark, many hours after we ended the call.
I will myself to cry.
The pain boils in my chest and aches in my bones.
But I lay in silence, trapped.
Are we not even worth tears anymore?
Is this when the grieving stops?

I fear seeing you now.
Because I am half bloomed.
The branches we grew on and nurtured
Are drying and snapping away in the breeze
I fear you will not like me
If you see the stranger I am now
Foreign and thorny to the touch.
Will you still think me pretty?
Will you still want to touch me?

No matter how close I get to the edge
To giving in and sprinting back to you
To beg on my knees for your forgiveness
To ask you to help us bring back the love,
No matter what
I can not reconcile and justify
The hatred I held
For who I became when we loved.
Loathesome and breaking
Hair knotted against my scalp
My angles softened and blurred
Till I became more invisible to the world
Than I have ever been.
We stopped the world on its axis
Our minds grew old
Our bodies ceased their progress
And only came alive when we set each other alight.
No,
I can never return to a halting.
Dust is preferable to ice.
Frozen and still
To the death.

I am wind and rain
I must move to live
And life rises in my gusts.
The waves of creation
Roll across new paths
For I am alive again
Wind snapping in the sails
Rising on the seas
I soar to new skies.

The missing comes
The loss never leaves
Maybe I’ll always want you
But you’ll never be good
For me.

“Will you crush my spirit someday?”
It was almost a joke
When the fear was shared.

Now
Lying in bed
Day shifting to night
Unable to rise
Defeated

The truth
I let you become
The hand
That felled me

I try to write about you
Try to sing like I used to
Rattling breath
Wheezing and violent
The defeated silence

I lost my voice
Somewhere along the way
I stopped being everything
You insist you love

But are you just in love
With set paths
Predictable roads
Are you just in love
With not being alone

Deep down I think you suffer like me
There’s voices whispering
Telling you you will never be loved
And this is your last chance too

I tried to sing
I thought pulling out
What my old voice wrote
Would remind me what I sound like

But instead I’m in silent tears
Note after note
Verse after verse
Black and white it’s written
Obvious

I’ll tell you about my last songs
The last true voice I ever had
I sung our fears
I sung my truth

It’s so cliche
To say im broken
But the evidence is too damning
We’ve always been doomed

I sing about a last great defeat
Blades that ran me through
I sung about a soul tearing
A destruction of self

I cannot be in love
My missing pieces have not grown back
Fires ravaged the forest I grew
After evil hands tore them up
Right to the roots

Black black black
Loss loss loss

I guess I never really moved forward
The memories are fleeting
If they ever come up
I have forgotten the details

But the belief
The shattering
The robbing of self
Has come with me all this time

The labels given to me
I wear as a crown
Of metal and debris
Announcing to all
I am
Beautiful
Tragic
Lost

I’m still so in love with you.

Oh the hours I’ve spent
Reliving the pictures of us
I held in my mind and in my hands

I’d look so carefully
Study our smiles
Your eyes,
My eyes
Every freckle and lash

Looking for that offending something
That doomed us to fail

At work I’ve been helpless
Gazing out the window
Dreamily
Heart and mind far away
Wandering with you.
‘Oh that’s a girl in love’
The old lady said
As she chuckled and shuffled out the door
My cheeks reddening.

What do I make of it all
I had so much questions and doubt.
Why do I only grow in more love for you
The longer we are apart
Why won’t it fade
Like everything else?

How can I still want you this much
When I know so strongly we are wrong
Why can’t I even use
This violent imagination
To even imagine myself with someone new?

Everyday is worse
Than the one before it
My calling reaching deafening pitch
Ma coeur ma coeur
Come home.

I’m still so in love with you.

I want to throw my arms around you
Bury my face in your neck
Breathe you in
Oh how I crave you
Kiss every inch of you
Tracing the lines of you
Painting you with my fingers
Feel drums deep in your chest,
Under my hands
Your laugh like sun bursting
From behind clouds
And how you’d look at me
Holding my face so gently
Fires in your eyes
Fierce and gentle at the same time
The crooked smile
The nervous hands
Asking, never taking
Oh how I want you.

I live for your words
An addict I’ve become
Counting the minutes between
Each contact. Each word.
I imagine how you’d say them
The shape of your lips
Your summer eyes
Changing and folding
With the seasons of your sentences
If words were water
My darling,
Let it pour.

I’m still so in love with you

The missing is unbearable
Desperate and hollow I’ve become
Your ghost
A spectre to follow your bright futures
I never wanted to be a shadow.
I am becoming yours.

I’m still so in love with you

And for that reason
I can’t have you.
For I left you to force you forward
So how can I justify
Taking you back
Even if it is
Into my begging arms.

All things have their time

Flowers bud then bloom
In fragrant bursts of colour and life
Wilting, browning, curling and dying
Just how they should

Trees shake off the frost
Greening up skeletal branches
Till the trunk sways
Under a crown of bushy green
That slowly turn gold orange and brown
And drops
As the world cycles again.

We too, bloomed.
You made me bloom
Then we wilted
I wilted
And we ended.

My most fervent dream for us
Was always that we’d
somehow be evergreen
Despite what nature has taught me.

We lived in summer, and died just before winter.

Except I wonder if we are now
Just dead branches
Wilted petals
Fallen leaves

When since the ending
Greenery has burst from our skin
Better than the unpruned tree
Our love seemed to be.

Maybe we had to let the bad fall away
Maybe what we had was the bad
So that something better could grow

The world keeps moving
Whether I will it to or not
And gold that was not yours
Asked for me.

And I know we had our time
And this is a time for pruning
But how can I accept
Different flowers
When even as he spoke
I wished
For yours.

All things have their time
Sunflowers and deep roots,
Tell me,
Is our time truly over?

I dealt death today.

I know it’s a part of the job.
I know I’ve seen it too many times to count.
But today,
I felt it.

I left the room long after their family did.
There was no where I could go
To escape their

Roaring grief.

They were long gone.
And I was left with their precious baby.
I curled his arms and legs up
Closed his eyes
Wrapped him up gently.
With love and respect
Here he’ll sleep forever.

And oh,
They are so thankful,
That it was me
That I understood
That I was so careful
That I spent the time with them.

And you’re not supposed to take it with you.
You’re supposed to leave it
When they walk out the door
With one less goodbye.

But I took it with me today.

The way they felt before
The way they felt after
The long quiet goodbyes
The man in a suit on his knees weeping
The mother and son making a cocoon
Sheltering their dying baby.
The solemn face of the woman who plays god.
The green death.
The last breath.
The heaving of the living as he gave his last.
The waiting.
Slower rhythm.
Quieter.
‘He’s gone now’.

I watched the clock
The same way I had
An hour before
Waiting for death.

Soon as I could
I fled out the door
Ran into the street
Tried to outrun it

Instead I ran to you
I dialled your number
With shaking hands

I know I’m not supposed to
But all I wanted was you
Your voice

Ringing out
Thankfully
I wept alone.

Today I dealt death
And I found I am not strong enough
To sustain this
Alone
Or for long.

I found I still consider you my haven
Deep down
But that you are not my haven anymore
Or should be.

I listened to the silence
After the call rang out
And decided

I wander between
Believing you really loved me or not

Whether it was just a name to put to
The intensity
The infatuation
The longing
The home
That we were

Words don’t come easily.
But my heart,
They are the lifeblood of a successful love.

I have to use my imagination too often
And she is a violent thing.

So
Let her in
She who comes after
My madness.
My love.

Tell her everything
Don’t make her guess
Don’t only tell her once
Don’t assume a title
Is enough to know the book.

Share your inner world
Tell her of your sorrows
The strange thoughts
The joy
The pain

All is worthy
All helps her understand

I think that’s what it came down to with us
Too much guessing
I never told you what you needed to hear
I sat in your silences guessing too often

It was hard
For both of us
To speak

You know,
Raising one voice
Encourages the raising of another.

So
Don’t make our same mistake.
Skip the wounding quiet
The voids where there should have been something.
Don’t discount the words
Because they mean nothing to you
Trust me
They will mean everything to her.
They will prevent the withdrawing from each other.

I will do the same.
I am not guiltless.
I am not without sorrow
And regrets.

And now you’re far from me.
It’s foolish, I know,
Speaking to you,
Here.

I try to tell you
All the things
I never could.

Maybe I will forgive us now
For our silence

By breaking it.

I think when you leave something
Healthy
There’s none of the poison
A hurtful goodbye has.

You spend less time healing
Because there was less damage
Like leaving a flower unpicked
To cycle how it should.

The bliss fades
The heat disappates
Until you find yourself
No longer living for the warmth
Finding yourself
Your own source of light.

These past weeks
I’ve felt your absence
Hollowly
Achingly.
All my movements
Jagged and uneven
Missing the piece of me that was you
Not knowing how to live without it

How I call for you

How strange it is
The day you wake up
And find yourself breathing
Air that didn’t ask for you
To make it taste so good

I found myself waiting
Those silences that destroyed us
Became so tiresome
And I had no desire
To hold onto them
Even though it meant
Letting go of you.

You’re much better at letting go than I
And your forgetting
Your quiet
Your leaving
Has helped me take my first
Sure steps
Away from us

You’re my golden heart
You will always have that name
My good and faithful coeur
You brought me to life
Wilted and dying
Bearing so many hurts
That should never have belonged to me.

I painted you as the sun
Blooming orange and gold on my night horizons
My ashen skin
Shook off it’s dust
Green and living
I rose because of you.

How we have loved.

I sleep under endless constellations
Surrounded by foreign
But welcoming voices

I am alright

The night sings
I’m reminded of you
And our breath rising
Under the cloak of another sky

But it is good.
We were good.
Your memory building me
Instead of breaking me
It’s all I know how to do.

My coeur,
My heart.

I think I can let you go now.