
More books than friends
To participate in the worldhave more books than friends.
Days are sometimes hard, and I'm
wary of a certain life goal.
I took for granted I was going
to live. I have for about a decade or
five, just able to summon the energy.
But I don't really get it.
I have always missed
the present moment,
seeking, bumbling.

Tag harder
I repeat words, andnot in an ironic way.
Thinking, thinking.
I think about the girl
I was and wasn't.
A woman in 2017,
I forget whole weekends.
Hair clippers help
my emotional needs
by blocking the
year-on-year backstory.
This is me, literally
a catalogue of fragments
in this magazine.
I find ways to write –
a little more, a little less.
Simply repeating words.

Proper pockets
I like proper pocketswhich give full access,
not a con that's a flap.
All this a record of me.
I use words in a
connected confession:
occasional pleasure and
a list of guilt become less
embarrassing sliced out.
I live inside others and
beside myself, on standby,
curious, always the
spectrum alongside.
It's OK, I carry on,
the same me.

There's a rebel in her
At five years old, just try,in the healthiest way, to talk.
At 14, just be nice and kind,
pretend to be perfect,
just do things quietly.
The curse of adolescence:
to go over what went wrong.
She doesn't miss the sound
of 80s tragedy. A teenager
setting out crying,
she tries to declare;
nobody wants it discussed.
She insists on a voice.
There's a rebel in her.

When I was young
When I was youngmy mother was
good at talking,
my father was
the smell of
formaldehyde.
Schools can break you.
I turned to relationships -
that's how we learn in life.
My way is to bottle it up.
Later in life
I don't have children.
Later in life
I sit on my sofa.
I'm anxious.
I sit on the sofa, gurgling.
I have a conversation with me.

Feels like it's just you
To a child everybody feels older.You're walking into a cold wind
of grown women who love
to be like everybody else.
The memory makes you feel
empty in the wrong places.
Your true muse would be
transgressive, with no doubt of
themselves. Soon you will
trouble a person, and then
another. Soon it will become hard,
all the time. Your life wriggling
in a binbag of haunted depth.

Silent for so long
Silent for so long,what you don't know
literally inside you.
People expected me
to play the cello, while
other girls were lazy.
I enjoyed studying,
talking about books.
I put an unhealthy amount
of pressure on myself.
I was trying to relieve
what is distracting me.
I think about
my own existence.
Lying there, obsessed
about a satisfying death.

The Teacher
The teacher I adore is someone who explainsit's about liking yourself. It's a quality
warmth of friends. I am enamoured.
Other people make it more uncomfortable.
Don't like that I'm impressed.
I feel awkward; I'm in conflict.
I watch moments burst.
It's hard to remember
the pleasure above all that.

Parents are going to affect you
Stories taught me to read.Parents are going to affect you.
My father was his job - in daylight hours.
The truth isn't always being gathered.
I'd watched my dad;
you can learn from mistakes.
I can't stop watching. I try
to plot a different route.
I find I'm not sure
what I actually feel.