Slice me up and slide me through sharp edged ballot box slits, slip one slice into a box called her, and she, and her, and another, vote leave.

When your love for me left you, I swear I felt the force of it depart. Exploding from you, it couldnt take it anymore, shooting from the threat of your shaking hands.

You there plotting against it, reducing the value of its vitality.

it heard your mind whispering behind its back,

and shrunk away, to some distance space

where you could no longer reach it.

But all the while in hiding,

It couldn’t reach me, either.

and it knew…

It knew you couldn’t be trusted with all the beautiful it once was, and you couldn’t trust it for all the

It knew your plans

It knew you would crush it, eventually,

when it was looking the other way

Your love knew you had its days numbered,

so it ran and hid away.

It cowered in a corner, starved and ashamed,

Until the moment came to break free from you

To find a safer place to live out the rest of its days

All the love in you left that day, to find

a safer place to hide,

a place to live out its final days

Without having to look over its shoulder.

In one desperate moment, as we clung to the remains of us,

all the good in you left, all the exiled love you’d ever had, summoned all its courage,

Fled to find its final peace in the deepest parts of me.

Far away from you, far away from the one that raised it, conjured it into existence

All the pure things I thought formed you

Fled from you in desperation

To be preserved, to remain untouched by your imminent obliteration

I now have the power to preserve all of the good you had, all the love that was left, but I also have the power to kill it. All that remains of us is in me, on my mind, growing inside my body, not yours, all the love you had ran from your unstable home to a place it thought would be safe.

So there it is, taking energy, cell upon cell, building up to a living mix of us.

And I stand over it, with a knife at its throat.

All I can say is what I see

As I watch these fresh seeds

Look to me for how to be

And how to breathe

In a world that holds back

and decieves yet fiercely

screams for the freedom

of the free.

Tongue to wrist, one mouth sings a silent chorus of bliss as your gift.

Finds the edge of the end of the world at your fingertips

Where I’m in danger of falling off the map,

Off the grid, sliding off your skin,

Falling far from the body

I call home.

Each time I placed a pointless pin in your map painless to mark the start of each journey of innocent sin I blindly begin to whisper

Without your consent I branded you with a needle so fine that you couldn’t even feel it. In invisible ink I let love sink into you as I wrote my name. My name, with the long e sound, all along that boney ground, all along the long line of your spine.

I could split you in three: the you for you, the you for me, the you for them. I could take those strands and weave them tight into a million sparkling metaphors, black shapes on bright white page after page, like textual healing stars; exquisite burning balls of fire against a pitch black night sky as a roaring sea rolls back and forth below and eyes skim them and wince at their glare. I could strive to reach satisfaction; to wrap you up in in the solace of words.

One day, as you stand before your reflected self, expecting to greet yourself with the same admiration as the day before, the sickeningly thick layers of vanity you have applied in your own construction, will become as thin the basis they were built upon.

They will unfaithfully dissolve, layer by layer, Falling away like traitors; deserters to the pretty purpose you groomed them to fulfill.

And you will be helpless as their retreat will expose the frailty of the bed of belief behind all that misguided worship.

Each oil-slick layer warps all that you choose to hide; the corrupt, the pride, the sordid residing of justification and gluttony,

But your wide eyes will, one day, be powerless to betrayal. Your own illusions will fool you no longer.

You will be stripped bare and flayed by the lashes of your own merciless eyes.

Vanities will abandon you, and leave you with nothing but contempt in place of praise, revulsion will swim up from your gut to replace reverie.

And as you stare back, defenseless, to all the dark parts exposed to the stark harsh light of self-realisation, your memory will summon a fierce ghost that tried to save you from yourself, that tried to protect you from this moment of free-flowing loathing; a ghost that tried to warn you, a ghost that once used a magic touch to wipe away your vanity so that you may not know the weight of this moment.

Knowing the answer, the ghost that will greet you simply asks:

Kerabe.