Sometimes I’m reminded of how I saw the sky,

How my shoulders must’ve felt a little lighter,

Without just a jacket holding them together,

Without the wind to breathe it all away.

But when I’m tied to new walls in my sleep,

I hear those same words grasping at my neck.

That crawling silence, maybe I’ll always hear it,

Let it bleed into those moments as I walk home,

To fall over and over into what I can add to it,

To fall over and over into what I could’ve done,

To fall over and over into what I could’ve said,

To fall over and over into who I could’ve met.

“There’s nothing of you back there,

Nothing to look for,

Nothing to hold onto,

And nothing you can leave behind.”

I’d like to think we’re all collages

Made up of the bits and pieces others give us

You listen to the same music your parents did

You wear the same shoes your mates had

You wear the scarf your mum had

You breathe the way your aunt showed you to

You went and got the same haircut as your cousin

You still cook the same breakfast your dad did

You say the words that you were taught to say

You speak with the voice the world has given you

And that’s got to be what we’re lucky for

The same faces I once knew

Now in others on the street

Refected back through stained windows

Shining through their single sheet

Maybe they'll be in someone new

With another name

When they're pulled out of my chest

And wrung out of each vein

What was present 

Has now passed

What was of the mirror

Is now just shattered glass

In the eyes of reason

They’re only little pieces to lose 

Between the floorboards

The Architect didn’t choose

So send it all off

Burn it all away

Remember how they spoke 

Of moving on for another day

So you might as well get too close to the sun

Write them a million more reasons to stay

Go and strip back the room

Until the numb walls lay

Most of the time I don’t feel a thing

Torn out of my own paper spine

Resting back on some false cutout

Pulled towards the light of the flame

And it’ll fold down eventually

Creased along the long line of my sky

The same I thought I’d seen lit up

The same one I thought I’d seen burned away

With the lighter in your hands and eyes

Remembered only by my scattered phrase and missing form,

No longer in person, but living on a tape.

So use your words as a canvas,

And speak louder over those with blind eyes

Go and paint the sea into your life,

Its endlessness,

Like some obscure portrait,

Only to disappear completely,

Left to crack and fold, exposed to the eternal spray.

I remember being sat at the end of the gallery looking at the glowing portrait in the corner. Its eyes had reminded me of my mother, warm, and unmistakably so.

‘Have you ever forgotten your past?’

I felt something tear down my back, realising I had heard these words from someone before. I wanted to ask her how she knew, but she read that thought, too.

‘I just observe. I don't make a choice to get out of bed in the morning. I'm laid over canvas.’

One day, I'll forget it ever spoke: maybe that's what it knew for sure.

I often see a world that crushes creativity and likes to pull apart the vulnerability that comes with it.

I believe that creating something purely for yourself will always be the truest form of self-expression and is the real purpose of being an artist. Even if you do a rubbish scribbled-out drawing of a dog, it still represents the thoughts and feelings you had at the time. It is not truly meant for anyone else. It does not prove a point or exist to fill a frame or a gap. It is not just ‘content’. But today, I think that the art and creativity we see has been forcefully distilled into it. It is always served up to us by an algorithm, an Instagram feed, a YouTube page. Nothing has the same worth, there’s only popular or unpopular art. Only safe or challenging. One image has a thousand likes and another has none. By choosing to accept that our art and its emotion is like this, just an item on a conveyor belt amongst billions of others, we will never see the breadth of differences we have as people. 

So everything is unique, and everything is vulnerable, so we shouldn’t push it into something it shouldn’t be.

I looked in the mirror today

Saw the reflection of everything

I am, I was, shunned behind light

But I’m torn from it, torn from framed guide,

So push us both back into the glass,

And shape skin around its cracks.

There it is again. That hum. Behind me, through my walls. It’s not the radiator. It’s not a streetlight. It’s only been here for a week, but it’s always there. Always underneath everything else. Always at the back of my mind. Always pushing into my skull. A reminder of the stuff I’ve done and the stuff I haven’t. Always underneath everything else. Out of my control.

I took a sharp and cold breath in as I stepped into the hallway to console what was left of me now, and I saw my thin and pasty face reflect back as I walked past the mirror centrepiece. I watched a car drive past the window, flickering in the single-pane glass. Could I really be alone with this now?

Have I always been spun into your cotton head?

Some five words against our pulse

Not the clothes that tie my bones together, no,

But the phrase that repeats nothing said

"Don’t leave yourself a wreck,

And you’ll 

fall 

down 

never"

So thin out my own thread

For you’ll be the only one to recollect

I felt my skull rattle as I lent all of my body into the side of the train once more. There was still that unshakeable pit deep inside my chest the closer I got to the station. Never-mind the hours of preparation I had done or blissfully running it through my head - I knew I was out of control this time. No matter what I would say, how I said it, no matter what I would do, or how I did it would end up swaying the members of the board into my hands. ‘I am only a junior’, I so ignorantly reaffirmed myself. ‘They don't care for your sugar coated demeanor or risky financial ideas.’ ‘It will mean nothing.’ ‘You mean nothing.’ God, I'm such a nihilist.

The mile of street that paved the way to my office seemed as though it only served to lure and trap commuters like myself and the unemployed there. Job adverts, posters, street signs, shop windows and bus timetables always took you patriotically up, and further up the road. Many of them were for the same firm, my firm, too. ‘Build the future of tomorrow today!’. I'd be jealous of whoever was reformed enough to have joy to work sparked inside because of those words. Maybe working a 9-to-5 was never much of a positive life outlook.

Fire embers, floating in the darkness.

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel

A middle-aged man stands on the side of a road, only a silhouette, stuck in stupor watching a car wreckage burn.

A body of a young man, lying headfirst in a shallow river. The roaring fire lights up the water.

And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides

A strong wind rushes through the trees, blowing the embers away from the fire.

And a dark wind blows

Buildings on the street, raided, abandoned and in ruin.

The government is corrupt

The middle-aged man turns on a sink, washing blood and dirt out of his hands.

He empties a tube of prescription medicine into his hands, swallowing most of it aggressively, leaving the empty bottle and the rest in the sink.

And we're on so many drugs

He walks to his bedroom, looking out at the orange light shining through the veil curtains.

With the radio on and the curtains drawn

A ruined lighter rests in his worn jean pockets. His hand, resting at his side, twitches.

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine

The exhaust of an old car starts, spluttering out smoke.

And the machine is bleeding to death

Blood drips from the fingers of the man as he switches the lighter on.