Every Time I Talk About My Own Abuse For The Sake Of Justice Or Awareness, All The Words Punch The Back

summer in the city drenches everything in this unbearable sticky heat,

I am here in bed,

thinking about my blue eyed boy:

the sunlight washing over anything,

a daydream in reality,

all this harshness dipped in gold.

isn’t life just misery. and mortality. and suffering.

isn’t this mangled body so tired of dragging itself forward,

waiting for the next trauma to almost-cripple it.

but like the sunlight my blue eyed boy pours his warmth over everything,

my own pocket of the galaxy,

and his sun rays touch me like nothing else has ever touched me before.

summer sticks to him,

summer sticks to me.

and all this sweaty passion is

so strong I feel it from the other side of the universe.

I hate everyone else in the world but you.

Euphoria (2019)

4:02am. we were always doomed weren’t we? on the drive home, listening to bottlemen and waiting for you to kiss me. you and me, always heading for a dead end we knew was just around the corner.

I lean my head back onto the passenger seat whilst your hands grip the steering wheel, close my eyes and imagine you above me spilling your soul onto my lips. waiting for you to pull over and kiss me. always waiting, waiting.

cheap wine doesn’t quite taste the same without you. and when you lean in, I taste it all on your breath. the sweet clouds of alcohol and teen romance and the inevitable loss that’ll come from this. a backseat romance that won’t survive the crash.

lips so hungry and dripping with want. can you feel the way my body pleads for your hands? can you feel the way my lips grow more desperate for you? can you feel my skin growing hot under your touch, like the friction of the tires as the car swerves and crashes into the end of a one-way street?

bottlemen doesn’t quite sound the same without you anymore and mostly, out of all the pain you caused me, I hate that you’ve made me hate my favourite band.

“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

“You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it’s a lie.”

— Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and The Julie Ruin

Kim Addonizio, from ‘Blues for Roberto’, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems

here darling. summer isn’t so bright this year so come lean on my shoulder and baptise your sorrows in the valleys of my body. I know you’re crumbling under the weight of it all so lean on me until you’re strong enough to walk again. some flowers don’t have sturdy stems, and that’s okay. doesn’t make them any less beautiful, right? let my arms be your peace until the world outside stops sounding so much like violence, the chaos and busyness of it all. come, my love. mind over matter. you’ll start feeling like yourself again, I promise. love is being the hook, line and sinker. love is being the fish and the fisherman. love is knowing that sometimes it isn’t 50/50, that sometimes I must give more than I take. but love is also knowing you’d do the same for me any day of the week.

mustafa and I broke up today. My blue eyed boy is no longer mine. I expected tears to pour out of me, the ground to tear open, the sun to swallow herself with grief. but there is nothing. I feel nothing. he wasn’t the angel I thought he was, this picture perfect boy with a smile like gold. he was just a boy. screwed up and scared and flawed through and through.

said to me my body kept me with him. that passion overcame him and that’s he’s just a man. just a man. how could i expect him to be anything more. said to me the light in my eyes meant nothing to him. said he doesn’t see the point in staying. I felt the breath catch in my throat as we said goodbye at the edge of the river.

blue eyed boy. stay safe too.