THE FLAT BLEEDS WITH ME

I write my sorrows upon the walls

with whatever red the night has left in me,

each word heavy as rust

peeled from the bones

of a heart left out in the rain.

This flat has become a mausoleum,

four walls keeping watch

over the wreckage of my name,

where every shadow knows my face

and every silence remembers

what I was too proud to say.

I write of loves gone rotten,

of promises left to die quietly,

of hands slipping from mine

when I still mistook staying

for something holy.

The red trails down the plaster

and I watch it without blinking,

watching yesterday

make its slow descent

towards a floor that expects nothing

and forgives even less.

Some names I press so deeply

they seem to sink beneath the brick.

Others need no writing at all.

They live in the stale smell of coffee,

in the fag smoke clinging to the curtains,

in the grey light crawling through the window,

in this tired body

pretending, rather badly,

that it still belongs here.

The walls are full of me.

Every word I swallowed.

Every pardon I never gave.

Every love I held too tightly

until tenderness turned bitter

and love became another name for ruin.

And the more I write,

the stranger the man becomes

behind my own eyes.

Perhaps pain is nothing grand.

Perhaps it is only this:

a story written into the skin of time,

a poem nobody asked for,

a page left open

long after the reader has gone,

because some wounds

grow old enough

to rhyme with eternity.

Morning eventually finds the windows.

The red is still there.

So am I.

Not because I expect saving.

Not because tomorrow owes me anything.

I remain simply because

even broken men

sometimes carry on breathing

after the world has stopped

feeling like a place worth living in.

So I stand before the wall,

surrounded by the ruins of my own handwriting,

a poet sentenced to reread

the things he wrote

when he was foolish enough to believe

that pain could be made beautiful.

The flat falls silent.

The walls keep everything.

And I,

like a bad habit the years

have never quite managed to break,

remain.

— enitnatsnoC oãoJ