I want to be eighteen but I haven’t lived like it doesn’t matter yet and I don’t want to adult
idle
I think I might be losing touch, I can tap dance
the riff to Reckless Serenade but I can’t say a word,
it’s all a blur, maybe the words don’t matter, really, they’re like the
subtitles, but I’m deaf too,
am I? maybe the mirror knows, I
chew my nails for an answer, one ring, two,
third, I’ll adorn my face in finger paint, peach, pink, glow,
loop it along my cheekbones, restlessly
it’s something to do
I didn’t want to wake up this morning, not because
I hate my life or I hate life the thing,
I just didn’t feel like I could fit in with today, and
it’s not a new flavour of
tiredness, it’s just what life’s oil does
to you, or maybe it’s just me, maybe the more
I dig into existing, the further burning fire core I go, not in a
lustful, bold kind of epiphanic way, all I feel is like I’ve been slumped in
the washing machine too many times, all my life, like I’m so slotted in I
don’t fit, because I’ve been worn, and I’m out of shape, is that
a stretch? because everything feels like a word I’ve stared at
for a year and never seen before, and inconsequential
I want to play with fate, like an alchemist with her
bubbles, make different colours and paint my toes, blue, purple,
red, what shade, I could use it on my lips instead if I decide I don’t want
bloody nails, can’t really remove them or they would only get worse!
I can’t say I have tried, but I wonder what I’m like inside, really
like, it’s funny we never get a look in, do we, is everything still,
you know, living in red, or has it started to go a stained panty brown,
am I ageing badly? can’t get any, worse, I’m getting older every fucking
day and I’m meant to celebrate this graceful image of elegance, this
figment of divine poise stuck to the 2006 brown photo film of my dad?
I know they’re
just looking out for my fall, tip a head out and say something like
you can’t trust the help these days, I think our daughter needs a
therapist, but no, there’s nothing actually deformed about you,
because we made you, their heads are display cabinet snowballs
that need shaking, like me
some days I rise out of bed just to show them when I leave the
hole they rot in, to show the grown-ups the colours I crayolaed aren’t just in
drunken nights and g and ts or tripping on LSD but in the mirror,
a real, living dream
the walk-in wardrobe
I used to want to read to the world, a good night story, a
mid-afternoon siesta song, a toothbrush morning dance, I wanted to
strip and run through puddles after dark,
flash men in the corner shops buying pornographic magazines,
and tell little children Santa didn’t exist, it was a
repentant Grinch who stole instead
I used to want to be free,
I wanted everyone to know, that I lived life with no strings but one
I wanted boys to take off my clothes and walk through
my head, to hook on to that exhilarating
dizzy fizz as I told them every detail in my colourful illustrated
life, as I played the manic girl, the call girl, the sad girl,
and I’d be like no other girl, someone they’d never met before,
and giggle, blushing like crazy in
ripped fishnets lying on the floor with the stray, when all I ever
wanted to be was someone’s because being mine was never enough, and
I didn’t like living in my head enough, I wanted to fly in clouds
to live in the world’s, in passing to another planet
I wanted to always be leaving
nights dancing under new moons, finding clarity in new strange faces,
seeing colours and getting high
to feel the blaze of living
on the edge, my head falling off, my hair just clinging onto
the edge of a pick-up truck, I wanted a walk-in wardrobe, from
the first Barbie film I saw that wasn’t Mariposa, and it was
never enough, I wanted dirty sex, and hair killing dye, happy go
lucky inky stains smiling on my skin, and the taint of a girl who’d lived,
in film
boy X
why do I have to explain, I revel in the weighted weightlessness of the casual habitual crush, I listen to Cigarettes after Sex before I sleep, and think of the boy in maths, and it’s bliss
a few weeks ago we packed up, went to the airport,
on a trip to, somewhere
and last night we traipsed around Italy, it was
dreamlike,
the view on your arm, and the reckless
wheels sliding along the belt around our
feet and I
remember thinking, you don’t go away with every
girl? and in that stretched out blue I felt
loved and luckier
lying in your dusty pipe than
walking around dewy, in love
