i feel like i should fuck this up-it's too intimate to cum so loudly
you're too
close.

your sad eyes go way back
from my little eyes of lying
and we wouldnt trust
the words
that leave our lips
for each other.

saying i love
i think of everyone
i have hurt
and loved
and wanted
and i think of destroying
and making it work.

---jade and i have said the i love you

i hope so---

hiding in
blanket times,
cheeks damp and
shaking to a sudden halt

i find my stomach overlaps
my thoughts
and it's nothing
but time
evolving,
body remolding.

i took away
nothing
and now im filling
the room to the brim
spilling water words
anywhere's a good start,
a fresh and fragile
and beating heart.

new love is frightening and little question marks up my spine, as the way we kiss is too new for the both of us. we are fresh and uncomplicated and i try to be honest, and over share but id rather her leave hating who i really am than stay around to lies. i am ice-free and happy and fat. i am trying not to echo past relationships and trying to make this one last. if i get hurt this time i think i wont come back.

old love, recent lies+lost friendship, new-like-something-nice....

any time now would be fine, to let go.
i spoke to mel on the phone and all this SHIT jitters on through me over me up my spine like someone screaming too loudly, only that's me screaming that's my voice and my hand slamming hard against the door. i try and shake it out of my head with sudden movements but my brain is buzzing and my scalp is crawling and it's her, it's her that makes me feel like this.
if i wanted to i could just not reply to her messages. 'IT'S HARD HEARING YOUR VOICE TOO' but she calls me keth and says she dreams of me. i know it's lies but i lived by those lies. i wanted her to love me right and she didn't, we didn't and i still think it was my fault despite what i say to everyone. she didn't know me but she owned me and she still does and I WANT TO SHAKE IT OFF ME.

maybe it isn't real it's just me drawn to the drama we create and the safe feeling of rotting and worthlessness that she brings me.

---andrew didn't know he came too soon couldn't see i couldn't love him enough when i was amazed the real world wanted me when i still wanted to crawl as far back as i could from it/it was too loud and bright for me/and so am i/wanting for him to gently rescue me, coax me out from myself and my wicked thoughts and ways. andrew i needed to hold my hand/if we'd only fit properly/but i was scared of the masculine shape of it all/i couldn't get over mel and my detachment from men/i couldnt commit to him/so we never got anything, only half friendship and half promises i made on wings/wanting for us to fly together and shoot up wished love somewhere maybe behind the eyes so only we could see it----
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i am seeing a wonderful woman now. she is gentle and caring and says all the right things and is a perfect projection of everything i look for in a person and i am trying to say the right things but i am scared/of a lot/i am too shut off with too much misplaced love-maybe not love-just the past, just emotion, still looming. but i will do this right, and slowly. and i will not need anyone else-and the great thing is, even though she has gone away for a few weeks, I haven't needed anyone else. I'm just waiting for her to come back and we can take things slow and gentle like her kisses that leave me feeling dizzy and unbalanced, in a good way for once.

spear yielding savages
with streaks of war
above their cheeks
coloured a natural blush
from spilt blood
eager as captive
as release.

only treebeats and rain
fall and the clammering of
feet to run.

the pleasured howl
of torn
flesh in dirt.

our eyelashes touching
so i could crawl in
to the back
in the safe
sound crack
behind your ribs.

cagy from the start of it,
i offered preemptive apologies
to our friendship
and saw in you
relentless
saviour
to my soon repented ways.

take from me, this,
i chose,
injesting your marrow
sucking at every break
i could find
swearing our veins could survive
each other.

you can live in the air pocket
i fucked in to creation
you can infect me
fearlessly
with our fail proof plan
fast tracked
to disintegration

us living
each lesson through
each other.

Growing time
sings patterns round her
feet to trip
the unalert.

She plays
relaxed in the watchtower
forgetting guards
and the glass chamber
she built to live

a poem for andrew...3 wks til his return.

Dead locked,
their twin eyes
stung of sleepless tears.

He hated her tattooed,
stained of
promises made on wings,
matching in their Fears,
obvious, like her-ha-ha-ha-laugh.

Of potion yielding boogemen
with travelling vans
that make the black of forgetting
and waking madness too murky
for him to feel anything
but hating her easy.

They both cried
winks of glass
and everything she touched
coiled around her tightly
with attentive gifts.

He knew already.

It was a sharp choice
to blame / each other,
quick, torn strokes

they overhear
late in lone thoughts

blankly searching
for their mirror eyes,
shaking heavy off
their picture frame
lies.

that old unrequited chestnut...

i see you by fire
lit in technicolour
and her
by your side
you spend your time
around each other.

[i would merge
as charcoal to the tiles
by your toes
i hate]

you glisten in each other
and it is a satisfying sting
to keenly borrow
of that warmth with
desperate alliance

i make
to weld
to the two of you

child's admiration
[naivity]
that i would take
the one of you
to be my own.

work in progress..

dionysus lurks
at mid-hours
taunting our blood
with flesh:
games not yet done
for small boys to play.

the head of the creature
his mind, animal
as his gift.

he comes
to tear us,
yet marks his own.

his soapy disposition
scratches raw,
his hubris as grimey
as the surface,
his ideals.

he looks
as stale wine
not a red-drop out of place
but a sour taste
that lingers,
desperation.

what of the woman,
more defiant that he;
the lovers that bind;
the child whose innocence he rapes,
waking frightened
in a wall-less room.
the other, both woman
and child
who plays to the game
fueled by anger////////////I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS NEXT BUT I AM VERY VERY HAPPY WITH THIS NEW PIECE :)

i have done a wonderful job at floating through months as my cardboard cut out character in the book/my life/i was avoiding. half-smile-half-life. now, owning up to myself and step by baby step coming in to my own, i can see how i have wasted. and i can see how frightening the person i am with out a smoke stained veneer is. andrew and i used to talk about choice and addiction and i always had that in mind as i started smoking more and taking anything i could get. he went to jail and i chose to remove myself too starting with a massive line of k to trip away for a while-til i got my hand on my own pipe and then a collection; then an obsession, then an illness. i just kinda stumbled through all the months, one hand clutching my stomach in pain the other tightly clinging to my pipe, or a beer if it was over. the sickness is more in the escape than in the decay of my body, i know that. sicker is how i felt nothing sleeping around on andrew, fucking off life for drugs and empty company. nothing's real, i just kept saying, nothing can hurt me, and it wouldn't- i was cold in all sense of the word. ice queen feels nothing, except maybe that pain in my stomach and embarrasment/fear shitting my pants on a main street because i hadn't had ice for a couple of days and my body didn't know how to cope...

i don't know how to finish this blog...it's not finished yet...

i wanted to forget losing andrew to FUCKING BEECHWORTH (now i hear he's fucking muscles/ and he's going to be a junkie WITHOUT ME he had the fucking ordasity to wish me got luck with WWJD admit it WHACKING UP we just wanted it all we thought we were PERFECT i CHOSE another way I LOST MY WAY but i needed US andrew andrew)and i wanted to forget losing mel I LOST ANDREW AND REALITY. i am terrifed of reality and my mind living in capital letters and strange punctuation.

i remember this. i remember why i tried to escape it.

over dramatisation...some times u just write...

everytime
i inhale my stomach turns
it screams as cats on traintracks,
i test myself.

i admit, if only
in the seclude of my room
by smoke and firelight,
i like the illness.

i look interesting
a little off colour,
pale grey thin
and yellow teeth
and hands of ice
and white dotting
my future.

these hands that shake
after too much or too little,
pick at any loose spots i can peel,
nod knowingly to anyone
with homemade pimples,
a gaunt kind of
bittersmile,
caloused thumbs,
shaky hands.

strange obsessions
and word games
learning new things
about the same thing
challenging trusts
with a wavered balance
between paranoia
and selfishness, need,
human nature.

attachments
built at the wrong hour
under the pretence
it is different.


a friend once asked me what ice was like
and i said its like life,
and i believe that.

for nat...

a beautiful friend of mine
who i dont tell
i love enough
you and i both fall in
to unforgiving
self proclamations of
loathing
and waiting, weighting, waiting for this to stop
darling.

i dont think you ever get over it.
like alcoholism i think it is a disease
to carry
in a matching carry on bag
and you do so well.

there is so much more
to
let your many miles a minute mind
rest on something else
that doesnt leave you
over a toilet bowl,
starving for real.

x

crack poems

I am better
crazy
in that red
on cars.

I understand
the path
my mind wanders,
now I am dead

space.

----

sweet kiss,
more than
three-day-wake
breath.
her sour
under tow,
second hand
smoke
in my room.

----

I don't think of him
as my ex
I don't think
of him. He went
to the farm,
plenty of room to run around
and decide
who we are
for each other.
Room to breathe
and embrace
and forget.

i let addiction slide in,
it's easier than breathing.

since when do i rhyme...

im sure id be there with you
if i could look past my eyes.
we laughed just like heart break
and you seeped through my mind
like disease.
and every time with time it skipped with ease.

this time it hits slowly
like a brickwall through my cunt.
this time's soft like honesty

steel wool
and absent rules.

saying ok instead of sorry
living circles instead of real
forgetting no thanks
and take, no asking
no questions, excuse me

im sorry.
it was late night
for your mid-morning
and id moved like clockwork for a while.
one of us to fall behind,
i think where the missing odd socks go
sometimes playing with my mind.

**edited sep 03- i hated those first two lines. this whole poems so OBVIOUS.

I am blood red legs spread I am the lie that flies through your window at dawn and stays nestled close by the sill for a quick escape when needed.

be faithful to yourself

so I trusted old instincts
betrayed all senses
and felt my way through
a familiar a pattern
as the marks on my bed sheets
as the scars
covered carefully.

that same commotion
and complaints
heavy waste,
the air was thick
and easy
a well known joke to rely on.

“don’t trust anyone”
I said
“don’t trust me”

we will promise each other
of all things,
we will be different
from our pasts,
we will never lie.

somehow they pile on top of
each other.

what is obvious,
strikingly clear
is the Truth
of who I am.

my head is a buzz
of poems
and puzzles
the yellow on the train
is Very
and the light from the window
my light
is clear.
purpose is a day
no more
or less
but everything
seems so much more,
and every day
seems so more
beautiful.

It is a habit growing I know but it puts me at ease.
I realised today I can live my life as a book, and never have to worry about the consequences or tragedies that might occur.
I can be a delightful character and never truly be hurt off the page. I can enjoy the twists and turns and highs and lows and turn to the next chapter. And even if it’s not resolved by then it’s ok. It’s just a book.
It is wonderful the way you can completely disassociate from life while all at once embracing it.

she liked the way
the water burnt her
late sunday afternoon
turned to evening
like that trip
where it all just melts away.

-lies lies lies not quite lies little white lies delight-

when i pick up the phone at home i always hear the beep beep beep of the correctional centre and its never him. im not home when he phones and maybe its on purpose or maybe ill say it is so i can look like a tough cunt and i can be FINE and hes the one with the problem hes the one whos changing. tell them im scared he'll be mean to me/he'll confirm what he already knows i am heading down a different direction to where we originally planned. ill keep my one promise i can for him and that beautiful day will be clear like china and we can meet back there i swear and we can start over. we can get a chance to start. he will hate everything i stand for but for pities stake will stay with with me so we can say we tried and our friendship is stronger. he can lie to me staight and arrow in my weakened heart and say it doesnt change what we are.

i do know that what ive made of us is mostly in my mind partly as much fantasy to escape the reality of everything that had passed and everything that was/is happening at this very moment. reality is although we know each other very well and love each other deeply in a way or as we can with the sort of friendship that we have acquired from each other reality is we do not know the truth of each other outside of walls of work and phones and we do not know each other in the real world we do not know each other more so it seems as the walls of a correctional centre seperate us. you told me not to get my hopes up or something like that-actually you said i was setting myself up for a fall. you set me up too though. was it more the heat of the moment whirlwind romance where you could have someone, intense and poetic crazy circles...without ever having to go anywhere near the shapes that we made?...or did you slip for a moment, release your guards and truly allow yourself to fall...for me...

andy and i lose control

I am learning you are not as perfect as I made you out to be. You are a scattered mosaic of all flaws that frustrate me beyond all means and makes me want to hold you closer. I am not the only one of us who needs looking after. You wanted to wrap me up in your tightest of tight holds and keep me safe and keep me innocent. You wanted to save me from the wicked witch of the past, and the bogeyman with clammy hands. You and I aren’t so different, something in your eyes tells me you’d like to be saved yourself. You and I are a lot of talk. You and I are frightened the same way, reaching for each other in the dark where there’s nothing so light as the way we laugh, about us. You and I are running away. And you are just a kid, like me.

Somewhere where head meets heart I had idolised you way up on this perfect little pedestal; just right for me to sit at your feet adoringly, all wide-eyed in your direction. Sooner or later you were going to fall, and the not-so-perfect parts of you started to break/break through and rebuild in to you. You are just a boy. I am drawn to the off cuts of you, stutter and arrogance and ratty hair. That tiny spark in your eyes that looks a little off balance/like you. A little scared that although you’ll never admit it, you might not always have the right answer. I wonder (and this wonder wavers near my very own fearful spark) if you think that you are better than me. You are as big a mistake as I am Andrew. But it’s not bad, not always. It is interesting and a very good short story (since the influx of letters have stopped, the size of the book has had to be cut considerably). And it is a learning curve- THAT you taught me.

i have this fascination with skeleton trees, like they have everything that makes a complete tree, yet somehow are not.
every time i see them i take a deep breath at their empty beauty.
growing out of water-for what?
i think she thought i was naive to think that that was the most beautiful sight imaginable. but to me it was a strange contradiction of life and death and a reminder you couldn't completely understand either of them.

i get scared/when im happy/ill be sad the ups are fast and too high for me to not worry about the fall. i remember sending riddles in txt messages to mel trying to make her understand that i couldn't place my emotions. that i couldnt keep up with what was happening in my head and it was wonderful at times but there was a strange emptiness surrounding the euphoria, where like me it wasn't quite right. and joking with andrew that i was manic and telling him EVERYTHING. that i was so fast at the end i always fell behind. not that it was to do with them, i just wanted someone to understand. more i wanted to know, did everyone get that? and you know how sometimes when i get nervous I becomes WE in my head...does everyone do that? am i doing this right? am i doing this real?

if what you're feeling turns out to be all in your head...does it make it any less real?

my mother told me i would be a very good writer, which would have been more of a compliment if she'd ever actually seen anything i'd written. she gave me three pages of absent-mother-catharsis outlining the demise of kerith from age 16 and up. drugs sex alcohol losing my arm to speed (apparently this is my future and she has watched today tonight ice is the new heroin).
and the best part is we never have to discuss it again. i can pretend it never happened and she can pretend she understands my life.

life lessons
experience
and every time
i wish it was over
i will learn.
until tears
shut my eyes closed
maybe i can teach you,
face bloodied
in the dirt
i can teach you
what it's like
to have everything
stolen.
with every last break
you will learn.

i am a doll. lying there with no say in the matter some people will never learn no. everyone thinks it was my fault, andrew blames me hates me. i know that i disgust him if everything in life is choices every step i followed led to me to that situation and i am that bloody pained mess that is too much for him when he and i both feel cheated. so every time i will deserve what i get and i will become what they want. i just want him to love me and now he wont because everyone else wanted a taste too. i just want him to hold me.

this, where tori amos songs have more meaning, and betrayal is not one sided: it resonates with every breath.

"why did you and mel break up?"

“why did you and Mel break up”
million dollar question or more...

I can't explain how degrading it feels when the person that you love and have dedicated your future life to holds you down and punches you in the face, proverbial or otherwise. I still can't work out if because I hit her first and because I've hit her many times since, am I the abuser, or the victim? Or both? Violence begets violence.

She'd hit me before, and that first time when I went to work I was praying Andrew would notice the dark mark beneath my eye but it looked more like tiredness and crying then anything and that he was already used to. That first time she had been shocked but she never told me she wouldn't do it again and I knew she would. And predictably I thought I probably would deserve it. I knew what sort of person she was. Like when we watched once for warriors and I said "well she shouldn't have been so lippy". In a sick way I was waiting for it to happen. She used to yell at me for flinching when we argued. But I knew. I defended her for the first six months, honeymoon sweet, to her and my friends alike and said it wasn't like that. But I flinched all the same. Realistically she only hit me 3 times. I have hit her repeatedly, tried to (if very weakly) strangle her. But not once, not even when she, a woman twice my size was cowering on the floor in the kitchen scared of me, did I ever stop being afraid. All the while I felt like what I was doing to her was mostly in show, at the end maybe so there was some passion between us: but when I first started breaking and having these strange violent outbursts, where I felt almost possessed by her rage, I wanted her to feel what I had felt.

She came in to my parent’s house and lay next to me. We were both drunk and I was hurt, abandoned (a feeling that would stay with me until our relationship finally ended) and she thought I had made a fool of her. I had made a scene. She didn't want her new, exciting work friends to know she was gay and I didn't want her to keep hiding me like I was something to be ashamed of. So I had drunk too much beer, cried and been rude, and stormed home. Lara had had to lend me money because I wasn't in charge of the money and with my childish 'I'll just walk home!' episode it was probably best someone organised a cab for me. The next morning when I checked my bag it was empty, Mel had taken the change from the taxi for god knows what and I'd had to work out some complicated scheme to pay Lara back without confronting Mel.

Apparently Mel had been trying to call me but my phone had died. So she showed up and told me that she'd been in this fight on Greville St, the police had come, and it was all my fault. And then that she'd picked up some other girl while she was out, and she said it so casually as if it was completely fitting punishment and my heart snapped and I hit her. I'd never hit anyone before. Not like that. Not and meant it. She grabbed me pushed me against the pillow and started punching me in the face. She held me down and pushed my legs apart and tried to touch me 'this is what you want isn't it? you fucking slut' I was crying and must have muttered something like 'please dont do this please dont rape me again' and she said that I was a slut and a joke and I had never been raped. And she left.

I didn't go to work that week. My face was badly bruised and swollen and the white in my eye had turned bloodshot red. Even I, the centre of drama and attention was too embarrassed to face people with that. It was my 20th birthday. I'd stopped seeing most of my friends so I had no one to celebrate with or remember my birthday really. I told the couple of friends I was speaking to I was sick and when Mel was in the shower or asleep I went in to the toilet, shut the door and texted Andrew to let him know I wasn't great, there was drama, but I'd be back soon. We were planning to go to the R&R event at work that friday together, had rallied hard to be able to go so we could get drunk and just hang out. It was during work hours so Mel wouldn't know. I half hoped she would go away for the weekend so I wouldn't have to lie about drinking or any of it. I didn't go any way.

Srangely the people who I was beginning to let down a guard with at work, accepted and were sympathetic to my refusal to give out my number (at mel's request) and were not offended, rather endeared, when I told them I couldn't be their friends in real life. They were concerned when they saw me break after break crying to Mel on the phone, but they never pushed. They just waited.

When I saw my family at my birthday dinner and when I returned to work I told them all what a clutz I was, I had tripped over my adorable new kitten and right in to the corner of the coffee table! Can you believe that?! And they did. Everyone laughed at how it was nearly as funny as if I'd said I'd walked in to the door! And I laughed with them, a funny cynical hard laugh that soon accompanied a lot of truths, the haha that followed most things I said about Mel and my 'insane haha' relationship with her, and later about my feelings towards Andrew. ('one day you'll fall in love with me haha')

Mel told me she would leave me and I begged for her to stay. She said she was bad for me and I howled and screamed and told her I'd do anything. It was all a mistake and it was all my fault, and I really believed it was. I thought, if I'd just done what I was supposed to, if I just didn't keep making mistakes, we would be ok. So the rules came in to place and things became more and more cornered, for my good and hers apparently. For us to work. It was that night that I had first taken that yellow post-it note with Andrews number on it out of my secret pocket and had texted him, nothing important. Maybe she somehow knew that I didn't want the rules any more. But I kept messing up and lashing out and bit by bit I was hardening. I was terrified, bitter, and a loose cannon in all respects.

This time she told me she would never hit me again. She hardened too and distanced herself from me, and though when we fought it was mostly one sided, now the love seemed mostly one sided now too. When we fought it was as though we had changed places through the mirror, now it was me irrationally waving knives and lunging at her with mimiced threats of rape and suicide (I remember thinking how odd I would say all those things, feeling like her, and not understanding a moment of it) and her just sitting there. Motionless. As I had. Things weren't so bad though. I thought maybe she had reached her peak and it had shocked her in to submission. I was finding it hard to control my growing rage, but she was keeping hers at bay so at least there was some balance.

I couldn't work out if I was making it all up. We fought made up fought distanced fought space fought. We tried to work things out. We reset the rules. She DID want me to have friends and did want me to be happy, and I was overreacting. I was going crazy. Everything was voices and fast and loneliness and a terrifying kind of manic and blood again. But she was supposed to be helping me. It was hard to determine what was real and what wasn't. I wonder if I'm still over reacting. Right before we broke up, she on the couch in the living room and me trying desperately to stop crying or wanting to die in our bedroom I couldn't find my way out. I physically couldn't find the door. I had no idea where I was, I just couldn't locate it all. When I think about it, I wonder if I just had my eyes closed. But she DID want me to have my own life. It's just, some rules still needed to be in place. Some how, because I really thought I needed her, I believed that giving her 4 weeks notice (or was it six?) was a reasonable compromise for me to do things with out her. Probably a long enough time anyway for me to get scared, and cancel on the friend before I did anything anyway. Enough time for me to cancel repeatedly on friends. Cut the very few I had left out of my life, the ones we had made together, when it was soon determined they were not a good influence on me either. Which meant, really, she wanted to have her own life.

When we got back from south east asia we joked with another couple, how we hadn't fought "that much HAHA except for those couple of times where I was locked in the bathroom scared you were going to kill me or because you told me I wasn't allowed in the same room/slut/HAHA and you told me being overseas made me realise you could have anyone/why waste time with you/slut/i will bash you when we get back to that roomHAHA" laughed too loud told the story too often, because it all just kept stinging and I knew what the right thing to do was and I couldn't leave but I couldn't let it go either. And I actually believed we hadn't fought that much. We'd had quite a lovely time really. And took some beautiful photos and got some funny stories to tell too. Besides, it's all just experience isn't it? Haha.

At some point layed out on the bathroom floor in ko phangan I'd sent my only text message to Andrew from Asia, and I'd told him-the first time in a long long line of messages and emails to follow that I would have to break up with Mel. I don't even understand how we made up. She called her mum. She asked did I want to come with her to have lunch. She told me I shouldn't act the way I did to her and it wasn't nice. My heart didn't rip this time. It just sort of froze there. I admitted defeat and accepted it was over. I just didn't go anywhere. But I accepted it, when she didn't kiss me for 3 months. I accepted it, when she no longer invited me places with her, when she stopped introducing me as her girlfriend, and when there was no discussion of us spending christmas together. I changed my flights just in case, but I wasn't part of her life any more. I accepted it, when on New Years (after a year of begging her to THIS year "stay with me promise me you'll stay with me") at 10pm she announced she was leaving to spend the evening-and the year, with her more exciting, fabulous friends. I already knew it was coming.

On our second last fight, probably the most dramatic of them all, I watched it all happen. I saw the knife and crying and screaming like all of our fights speeding up in to one and I figured either one of us was going to die that day, or we were going to be like that forever. I told her I loved her and kissed her and told her I couldn't leave her. Completely detached (like her) I accepted that this was the life I had chosen. I knew what she was like. I couldn't expect any more or less. This was what I had chosen.

A week later I moved out.

i have a very short fuse and am treading on a very thin rope, which is poor excuse for being a cunt to most people most of the time.

i think the most frightening thing about this whole situation is myself- i know that i know that's why i make predictable mistakes stumble out of control something obvious, but apparently i am quite entertaining like this, even if that's all.

but i love him i love him and i want him home.

i wrote to him when he gets out we will have a perfectly us love story to tell (i wish i didn't have to tell it)

i am predictable product//imitating photographs of who i used to be.
i am angry.
i may do many things i will regret//i choose not to regret not today i just want to feel something else.

i hate him for leaving me for making mistakes before he even had a chance to know me.

this story is different- half a year later or so, back to a different beat.
ive forgotten how to blog.

ive been writing letters every day which is different to any type of writing i know and i don't think i quite do it right because i just talk to him like i would and i tick tick tick and stutter and run off on bizarre tangents and interrupt myself and sometimes it is pretty and sad like i sometimes i am and sometimes its the day, always it is me. i never have to know how he felt when he got a letter from me. but i know they are read.

ill try again maybe with this blog-business
it feels strange like
i hope im not straining for something to say, but it feels familiar too. like an old friend.