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[unbearablysharp]

All Too Well

There’s a Hollywood-red grand piano high up on the stage, positioned at the top of a sweeping staircase. Taylor Swift sits at it, her blonde hair falling down her back, playing quietly as she speaks to us. “I write down all the things I wish I could say to someone. I put them in a song. Then maybe one day that person will hear it, and maybe they’ll understand.” I am inadvertently nodding. I am white-knuckle fists. Taylor smiles, “And maybe that’s a cowardly way to live. Or maybe it’s a brave way to live. I haven’t decided which.”

She pauses for a moment, lips silent as her long fingers dance across the keys in a slow-waltz. I swallow. I’m feeling uncomfortably sad. I’m feeling fluttery and fragile. Taylor turns and looks into the camera as she continues, her face projected on three giant screens at the front of the arena so that it seems as if she is staring right at me, right inside me. “Sometimes you meet someone, and maybe it’s only a fleeting relationship, but somehow… they change you forever.”

And I realise that it was exactly one year ago that I was in England, in Bath, at a concert, at an after party, on a tour bus, on drugs.

The music is gaining volume and momentum. Taylor is sadly serene as she says, “And you’re not supposed to miss him, but you do. And you remember everything. All the little details. You remember it All Too Well.” It’s an act, it’s rehearsed, but it’s real. She starts singing.

It’s been 365 days and I still remember the way he called my name questioningly, as if my very existence was a mystery. Your sweet disposition and my wide-eyed gaze. I still remember walking over to him, terrified of tripping in my heels, certain I would make a fool of myself, standing on tiptoes to kiss his cheek self-consciously. I can picture it after all these days. I still remember his smirk when I nervously said I didn’t do this often, still remember the envious looks of other girls at the after party when I arrived on his arm, still remember sitting on the counter-top with my hands tucked under my knees, swinging my legs, smiling; still remember feeling so out of place and alive. And I might be okay but I’m not fine at all. I still remember his Lynx and Colgate and bottle of nasal irrigation in the hotel bathroom, still remember my naivety, still remember suddenly realising how much drugs he must do, how many girls he must sleep with, still remember his Hot Water Music hoodie, still remember the zipper on my skirt getting stuck. I still remember him showing me how to turn on the shower, still remember the way the spray suddenly hit me in the face, still remember spluttering and blinking at him in surprise, still remember our laughter. Still remember my wet hair clinging to my skin, still remember feeling naked and vulnerable without makeup, still remember holding his hand as we lay quietly in bed, fingers clasped like a love-locket or a pinky-promise, watching British TV personalities counting down the top 50 or 30 or 20 or 10 songs of the 70s or 80s or 90s or of some genre or other – still remember nothing about the show but vividly recall fitting in beside his ribs, his chest, his gentle teasing, his hand on my hipbone, “I feel like men have let you down in the past”. ‘Cause there we are again in the middle of the night. I still remember waking at three a.m. and rolling away from his body, still remember pretending that a few inches of empty sheets would keep me from letting more than my limbs get tangled in him, still remember his head on my shoulder the next morning, still remember braiding my wet hair as we sat in the hotel lobby, still remember my quiet nonchalance, still remember my sarcastic remarks, still remember my breaking heart. You call me up again just to break me like a promise. Still remember exactly what I was wearing: my heels, cream lace lingerie, blue dress, stockings, red beret. So casually cruel in the name of being honest. Still remember the sweet icy English air, the bittersweet finite English caresses. Still remember pulling on my “Smitten Hearted Poets” sweatshirt, still remember my velvet coat with the hole in the pocket where I hid my clenched fist as we kissed goodbye and now Taylor is singing, Plaid shirt days and nights when you made me your own and I am crying, I am reaching over for my friend’s hand, I am gripping it tight so that I don’t turn into shrapnel or confetti, something that buries deep or flutters down, something that was once whole but is now splintered into sharp and bright and useless pieces, and I am watching the two little girls in front of me, watching as they kneel on their seats, waving glow sticks excitedly, so sweet and innocent and full of life when I am right here, breathing the same air but somehow deflating, bursting, my tears are dripping off my chin and onto my new floral dress with the bow that now seems so perfectly immature and I am worried about my makeup staining the pure white fabric and I am finally admitting to myself that I am hurt. I am hurt. I am hurt and I am not brave and I can’t keep making excuses for him because this whole thing is fucked up and it is over, it needs to be over, it is time to let it go.

Taylor is easing up on the piano, singing softly, Time won’t fly, it’s like I’m paralyzed by it. I’d like to be my old self again but I’m still trying to find it.

And I know this year of my life wasn’t normal or real. It was the dark side of a fairy-tale. It was the morning after. It was the coming down. Because life isn’t a story or a song or a poem. In real life, nostalgia isn’t beautiful and misery isn’t art. In real life, the emails get shorter and then they stop altogether. In real life, he lands in Auckland and doesn’t call. In real life, he won’t acknowledge how he makes you hurt. In real life, things like “I wish you were here” slip into “send me another photo”. In real life, jealousy isn’t something twisted and poetic, like a bleeding lines or a scrap-metal sculpture. It’s a rusty nail piercing a vulnerable sole. It’s bare skin and no immunisation. It’s puncture wounds and toxins. It’s listening to Taylor Swift and feeling like a little girl again, hopeless and hurt, still trying on emotions that are too big for you, that you’ll never grow into. 

[unbearablysharp]

I speculate the quiet nights, how and where your body lies who owns the knee that clicks into the jigsaw piece that I once knew

Frightened Rabbit, Radio Silence

[unbearablysharp]

Take me to the seaside or somewhere the sky matters and don’t kiss me do something unexpected, do something horrific gaze into my eyes and ask me about life like I know something more than how to endlessly disappoint

heavy heart, moonlit face, poetry for brains

lie with me I have so much to say about the universe expanding pressed hard against your jeans as we buckle under the weight of it all, unbuckle each other

wake me at midnight, make me confess: I want to be assessed the same way astronomers weigh galaxies – by measuring the brightness of stars

sometimes ceaselessly floating in infinity sometimes anchored in empty space  

I am hot white imprints on your eyelids when you look away

dawn the colour of porcelain plates, day breaks  pale and fragile

      a slip of a girl silhouetted against the sky

      a slow realisation of the unimportance of everything

[unbearablysharp]

I said I wanted someone to strangle my poetry, absorb the soul of it

so you kissed me

I was fixated, asphyxiated

sail to the edge of the earth and fall off

into the night sky

breathless nothingness

and I don’t know much about dark energy except that it fills space, makes the universe expand faster

dislocated glances across time

I guess we fell out gradually, substantially like Ptolemy’s theory of you revolving slowly but surely around me

[unbearablysharp]

Your eyes are broken bottles and I’m afraid to ask and all your wrath and cutting beauty you’re poison in a pretty glass

The National, Wasp Nest

[unbearablysharp]

Moody afternoon. New Stay Home Club bag, Talisker Dark Storm whisky, and a sulky little English staffy x shihtzu puppy.

[unbearablysharp]

Spring

The light, they say, is important – watch the way it hits things, bounces back, causes flowers to bloom. But it never touched me without leaving a bruise

I want warning signs, cautions: “tread carefully in spring.” My body is too easy to burst, into hope, like reading Twenty Love Poems and a Song of

Despair on a bright afternoon in the Esplanade, sitting beneath blossoming cheery trees with you beside me, blinking in the bright white of our lust

I need year-round reminders not to be reckless with my body: I don’t need someone just because it’s winter and I want warmth, or because

it’s getting warmer and I’m stripping off, feeling young and pretty again, or because the sun is at its zenith and I’m hot and your hands are as cold as

shadows, and they chill me when we touch with that sudden, sudden love. Down by the river the light is muddy, Neruda’s poems litter the street,

a crushed pink carpet of petals dirtied by the wet mouth of September, spat out like promises, trampled on by lovers on their way to leave

each other.

[unbearablysharp]

You meet a girl who looks out of place and fall instantly in love.

The cocktail party is full of people older than you, more sophisticated. Longer skirts, tighter smiles. Introductions are followed by quickly stalled small talk. Names and faces sink to the bottom of your wine glass and stay there. Nothing sticks.

Nobody is boring, but no one is particularly interesting either.

Then all at once there she is. Inspiring. She grins shyly. Swiftly hides it. You take a sip of your sauvignon, swallow slowly, glance up, holding her gaze as the conversation continues around you. You’re both wearing little black dresses, flowing fabric falling well above the knee.

You lean over and whisper in her ear, “Has anyone ever told you you look like Kristen Stewart?”

She laughs like a camera flash, lights up the room suddenly and then darkens, leaving you blinded and blinking. Close your eyes and see stars. A soft hand on your elbow, a breath in your ear, “Yes.”

And from that moment on, it’s like the two of you are in on a secret. In this room of awkward etiquette you are drawn to each other like sharks to blood, circling, working yourselves into a frenzy. She’s an events manager in Auckland but she wants to move to London. “Oh, my god,” you delight, spinning in your heels, hair and skirt swirling around your slim legs. You stop, grab her hand, sway breathlessly. “Let’s go there together!” The dancefloor is alight with your projected dreams, shared drunkenly but earnestly, and all the boys are trying to get her attention, or your attention – your combined attention – but there’s nothing except you and her and a bottle of wine that you take unladylike slugs from as you sit in the shadows on the side of the stage, tipping your heads back and laughing like lovers standing on the edge of a jagged cliff high above the sea, pale and exposed

[unbearablysharp]

Absence Amplifies Want

I saw your new music video on the internet. The one where you are playing your guitar and there are close-ups of your mouth and your hands. I watched your fingers on the fret board and thought about the nights they were inside of me.

It made me feel a little sick.

I told you once that your sense of romance only existed in your stories. You told me I was being harsh.

I stand (alone, fucked and forgotten) by my words.

You can get away with a lot when you’re always moving. Laying chords with poetry and holding feisty girls captive in four-four time. Blurred nights and smooth thighs. Always coming.

Always going.

Sometimes I wonder if you are trying to fuck your way across the world. I think that’s what I’d do, if I did what you do for a living.

If I did what you do and I didn’t have a conscience.

Kiss in every city, cum in every country.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t blame you for doing the things you do (what would any of us do, if all the dreams we had came true?). I blame you for going behind my back and booking a hotel room when I said I didn’t want to sleep with you.

For kissing me until I was hard and heated and desperate to have you, and then kissing me some more.

For fucking the cynicism out of me until I was vulnerable to impossible ideas.

Even feisty girls are fragile in soft morning light and absence amplifies want.

I want to tell you I am a nice person. I am a nice person and I am clever sometimes and I am funny a few times and I am ruined easily.

I want to tell you that you should know better.

Your new music video has a lot of views.

Jealousy is the worst fucking emotion. Fucking you made me the worst kind of jealous.

I can’t listen to your songs anymore without tasting bitterness. Sometimes I have to stop them halfway through and put a different record on.

Taylor Swift. Someone as young and stupid and desperate as me.

On Saturday nights I get drunk. Go out to clubs and request that the DJ play I knew You Were Trouble.

Find a mouth to kiss and fingers to hold.

I grind against a boy who is nothing like you, and that is both the problem and the solution.

[unbearablysharp]

How to lose weight in one easy step

A diet of heartbreak is the best way to lose weight

wasting away to the fading taste of stolen whiskey chocolate strawberries quick kisses and slow, lazy, Sunday breakfasts

in bed

bones thrusting through thin lace stretched tight against supple skin, warm in this oversized hotel room

he likes the lingerie my ex-boyfriend once said was his favourite

sweet, blood red

I excuse myself to the second bathroom in this VIP suite

stand in the jacuzzi small and ordinary

turn on the shower feast on the fucking memories start to starve

[unbearablysharp]

Watching a documentary on TV I am learning that by 2050 all the earth’s oceans will be empty

this is terrifying

and quite a problem for anyone who’s ever told me “there are plenty more fish in the sea”

You are the only one I will ever need

reel in the last glistening kill I am dying to live alone out deep

a salty mess of emptiness

who can’t stop fish-hooking on what could have been.

[unbearablysharp]

I don’t like being in a different timezone than everyone I love The only time I’d ever say anything meaningful & overdramatic is at midnight my time, 6 am your time So you’d be all stiff & sensible with morning while I’m oozing into the most honest hour of life

katejustkate, Long-Ass Poem

[unbearablysharp]

This is not going to be another poem about someone who didn’t love me enough

whitewash all emotions

paint bedroom walls sunflower yellow snub midsummer nightmares

you said “do you know van Gogh sold a single piece of art before he died”

I am trying to brighten up my life but

dark mind, cavernous awareness - I am running out of time

the colours drip from my dreams form cold stalagmites of fear

might never get better might never get away might never get over

you echo within

and we will die before we are recognised

[unbearablysharp]

fold myself into the frayed hem of your favourite shirt, afraid to take it off in case the world inside your head tilts too far on its axis and I fall off the face of your earth

we are out on a ledge thirty-six stories up you are kissing the bottom of my spine and I can feel myself slipping, stepping backwards into thin air until I’m white-knuckled and gasping legs dangling, kicking out to stay afloat holding onto the edge of your bed and you are picking my fingers off one by one

grab at unravelling threads, at your tilted-axis smile while the universe lurches until you are almost horizontal

lean down, whisper in my mouth

baby it’s a long way to fall to the bedroom floor

[unbearablysharp]

What do I have to say for myself

When I’m excited for the afternoon the morning dies slow as a distant star

One half of every goal I have involved you Now I have to reorganize It’s cool though Makes me feel clean to make new plans

Make myself out to be the better person By acting like I’m happy for you I am, in other ways Fold myself perpetually in & out of new excuses

[unbearablysharp]

A day when the dark is fizzing sunlight slipping through slits in the curtains cutting the morning in quarters shower for half an hour

we are a craft project, collected junk glued together

a broken mirror-mosaic of moments that mean something more than the memory of a closing door, than kissing on the bedroom floor

at that party let’s fashion something fragile ugly and elementary in the haze I’ll forget to handle you with care, cut my fingers on your sharp edges bleed and call it beautiful

I’m getting used to this waking with a headache, you far away and unable to kiss my flat champagne mouth and anyway I had too much to dream last night, stomach churning, take another tramadol to settle my mind.

[unbearablysharp]

Sweet sixteen and never been kissed (like this)

The average person spends sixteen days of their life kissing someone but you and me we’re overachievers

That first night beneath a streetlight in the rain you’re half in the gutter and I’m half insane with excitement we meet like oceans two bodies of water coming together

I taste like innocence this morning a whiskey virgin now with a mouth still hot from a shot of Jameson, the one you ordered for me back at the bar followed by another and another and now You’re hungry

the city falls down we become a watery outline and when the moon punches us out in halos we glint golden like coins tossed into a well, wishing for romance

you take me back to your hotel a moment of teeth and tenderness my body is a bouquet of chemicals held in your clenched fist

The average person spends sixteen days of their life kissing someone - I would spend the rest of my life kissing someone like you