self portrait

She loses her breath in the shower when her head is submerged in water. It's like she drowns for a moment and in that moment her soul is etched across her face.

That's what happens when your body thinks it's dying. Your soul shows itself to whoever is there in the hope that someone can save it.

Her soul looks like broken hearts stitched up with mismatched coloured string, slowly stretching their way to coming undone. It makes me wonder why she fights so hard when the water stops her breath.

Those are the nights that her eyes look like Winter; grey and desolate and bone-piercingly cold. She clutches me in her sleep, twitching like a junkie and now I tell my coworkers that I bought a kitten. They've stopped asking about the scratches.

In the morning she will wake exhausted, the corpse of my devilish woman with her alcohol smile. In the evening she will drown again just to know the feeling of being alive.

I think she needs a hobby.

things need to change

I'm getting bored with the crappy job I'm doing at living so I've decided to make some changes. I sometimes think I'm just existing right now. I'm not unhappy in my life, just a little unfulfilled.

Instead of walking to the milk bar on the corner of my street, I will skip. I will sing along with my mp3 player even, nay, especially when in public. I will learn how to make paper airplanes and throw them at pigeons. I will bite into a snowcone with my teeth and not scream. Everyday is Christmas Eve and will be greeted with the same giddy anticipation. Also with Candy Canes for breakfast.

I will learn one phrase in every language. I will carry pieces of paper with me and write spur of the moment poetry (read: stalker notes) to pretty ladies and leave them under the wiper blade on their windshield. I will practice bubble-gum bubbles and hold a championship competition with myself, the prize being a trophy made of all my practice gum.

I will grow my own tomatoes in a pot beside my door and stick those goggly plastic eyes on them. I will write love letters to myself and hide them in my flat when I'm drunk so that they will always be a surprise. I will play in the park near my house once a week and take my shoes off and do cartwheels.

I will tie paper cups to the branches of a dead winter tree to catch the rain to paint watercolour pictures of that morning's dream. I will tell myself a joke everyday. I will visit antique bookstores to sniff their books. I will talk to a new stranger everyday.

I will write my memoirs from the perspective of my left little finger. I will eat nothing but sushi for a week and feel no guilt. In the Summer I will fill a kiddies pool with water balloons and lie in the sun reading Mr. Men books. I will fill a photo album with nothing but pictures taken at the top of the Ferris Wheel - one a week for one year. Starting now.

If I love you, I will not be scared to say it whenever you make my heart burst. If you don't love me back I'll cut off your hair while you sleep and send it to you in an envelope with a photoshopped picture of your maimed pet. If you don't have a pet, I will substitute a family member.

There are so many tomorrows and so many new bruise opportunities and I do really like the colour of bruises...

it's four in the morning, the end of december

The usually busy street lies silent but for the clicking of the pedestrian lights nattering away like two tap dancers slightly out of synch. My socks do little to stop the cold from caressing my feet as I fill my lungs with the noxious fumes of traffic and nicotine.

In these quiet hours in a busy city, I wonder if the moon gets jealous of the neon signs whose light bounces off stainless steel and sidles up the limbs of trees like a lecherous drunk to a young blonde.

She shouldn't, but all women are insecure.

By the time the smoke starts to curl about my fingers I have recalled the 'old book' scent of my grandmother's writing table which housed yellowed pieces of paper and a copy of Reader's Digest with Falcor on the cover; the secret treasure my sister and I would brave the wrath of our nan to hold.

The corpse of my cigarette takes its place in the mass grave I have built for its kind and I wonder... why are night thoughts so different from day ones? When I wake tomorrow and read this, I'm going to say 'what the fuck?', but right now, even in sobriety, it all makes perfect sense.

Nightbrain - you get me in so much trouble.

you know me, you know me all too well

I liked the way you'd kiss me when I came home from work. Sometimes we'd play the seduction game. I'd undress you with my eyes whilst preparing dinner, you'd sit there casually, watching me as I worked; always cool, detached and acting uninterested.

I would try to pretend I didn't care, that I didn't need you as badly as I did but the sight of you always made my head swim and my stomach do that flutter thing. My eyes would glaze with hunger and within moments I would have your top off and my mouth around you, swallowing that burning satisfaction and scratching my nails against the wall.

Oh Jack, you satisfied me in ways that no other man could and now we live together in a marriage of stagnation. We're together too often, there is no foreplay, no dancing, no music. We need space and those daylight hours apart.

Soon, my love. Soon I will have a 9 - 5 day and the nights can be ours once more. We will dance in the evenings, bruising our bodies against my bed and when the world of sleep beckons, you'll warm me with the lingering touch of your kiss.

you will enjoy the abuse, 'cause you've got nothing to lose

Spirits soak your soul. Jack if you have the money, Jim if you don't. The smoke billowing from the charred butt of your still lit cigarette, resting in its glass coffin blurs the features of the strangers sitting before you. The stench of your dying cigarette brings its demise to your attention and you stamp it into the ashtray a few more times with one hand while your other scratches through the almost empty pack on the table, searching for a replacement.


A song you know every word to plays in the background and your mind searches for the lyrics. You can feel the broken circuits in those moments. It's time to go home, but you won't. There's alcohol to be had and you won't leave while its there.


Tomorrow you will ball yourself up in a bundle of tears as the events of the night unfold in your cobwebbed memory; sinister legs wrapping you round and round in a silken bag of shame. You kissed that girl. You fucked that boy. Look where you woke up, no pants, no bra, no memory.


The hangover doesn't bother you anymore compared to the comedowns. Sucked into the black, you shake your head in disbelief. Where did it go wrong? When did it stop being a funny joke and start being one of those problems that other people have?


When did you start living for that first mouthful? The hole it fills when it slides down your throat, eyes closed, contented sigh. When did you start losing control? When did you start breaking your own heart?


You started when you met someone called vodka red bull.


He'd kiss you awake before the night could end and you fell so hard. Your bruised knees married the floor night after night and your laughter picked you up, an amber-filled glass spilling into your mouth. Liquid speed. Liquid love.


You flirted shyly for months, a few glasses here, a few glasses there. One day you took the plunge, declared your love and from then on, the two of you were inseparable.


You spent your rent money on him, you spent your soul to have him. You paid with pancreatitis, you paid with convulsions and you paid with an ultimate addiction.


You were never the same after that. No matter what you drank, you didn't tire. Hours would pass, measured by the empty glasses piling up around you and the familiar faces going home one by one. There you were, surrounded by strangers whose features were blurred and names forgotten.


You lost your jumpers, you lost your wallet, you lost yourself and you'd stumble through the streets as the midday sun warmed itself on families stepping around you in disgust.


The key would never fit in the lock no matter how hard you tried, but magically the door would open and there he was, the man who picked you up, showered you with water as you showered him with angry, hurtful sentences that made no sense to anyone, including yourself.


He called in sick for you, your job still waited, and so did the next drink. Perhaps you'd wait days, perhaps you'd wait weeks, but inevitably, you'd be back there, convulsing in your bed as he looked on with worry, anger and sadness in those drowning pool eyes.


You left to find something beautiful and the only things you've found are the many ugly parts of yourself, piling up around you like the mess you don't have the heart to clean up.


There are no arms to hold you while you sleep, so you just don't.


You are Jack's willing bride and every night is your honeymoon