The previous life of your second-best smoking jacket

Floating somewhere between that soft dip behind your ear and the tight itch-pull of ponytail hair, the voice starts up again.  Not in a schizophrenic way, obviously, in the usual, non-mad way. It’s the nasty little hiss that tells you were never good enough, or that wonders out loud how does everyone else manage it? What’s so wrong with you? It tells you what you did wrong and cuts you down into small pieces that quiver and then lie still. And it’s the itch in your fingertips when you want to turn your mobile phone back on. After months of the day to day back and forth the silence is a constant twitch of idle hands grown used to snapping the screen back, exchange pocket to hand to bag to pocket again. But even if you do turn it on the screen blinks back at you idly, unaware of the hatred you feel towards the space unoccupied by a small envelope in the top left hand corner.

But it’s true. I do often wonder how much longer I’ll have to be on my own. I don’t always see it like that, but when I think of all the people I’ve known.. had crushes on… whatever. How they’re all happy now, despite whatever they may have done to me. Am I really so un-loveable? Unattractive? Boring? Of anything else, I couldn’t stand being boring. Boring is incurable. It feels like I always manage to ruin it just when I really start to like someone. Even if they ruin it first, it’s the timing that gets me every single time, like a bloody chiming clock of doom- Run away from the ball! Where the fuck are your shoes you fruit cake?

No one should ever tell anyone how they feel about them. If that was the unwritten rule then you could take out about four tenths of the problems. It would mean that indecisive people could suddenly change their minds without trampling all over the upturned face of someone else.

On the plus side, I’ve never been less in love. No lurking exes or suitors taking up space in the middle of my day, during lectures when I’m bored but should pay attention because Hey, they might not be around in 3 months but you’re still going to have to do a bloody exam on this, what a double waste of YOUR time, when I should be dancing madly with housemates but take a minute to satisfy that phone related finger itch. I just keep buying t-shirts with hearts and shit on them. I bought one today. It says ‘Amour’.

And to think, I nearly wasted a really good poem title on you. 

Catching the 19:47 from Liverpool Street

In love, is there a manner in which these two things,

The madness, or stupidity,

Can be separated?

Is it the two sides of the same coin or the reflection

Of the ghost train in the window?

Where someone else who looks like you looks

Out and thinks about the other side.

It was stupidity. Textbooks.

Cheap wine and chips covered in cheese like rubber.

Madness to be thinking about it at all.

(What use will worrying do? Be. )

It was the budding stem of a flower left blooming in the throat,

Coughed up into a tissue and thrown away again.

And the bin was undoubtedly the best place for it.

In the world of the ghost train

Was the girl with shadowed eyes and frazzled hair thinking along the same tracks,

Electrified routes or the dead and cold iron works.

Maybe this parallel train ran into a parallel time or a world where all of those things

Could happen there. Maybe there was no such thing as

Halls. Or girls in other countries that got to keep the heart that still beat next to his.

Did it

Flutter? Like a butterfly under a pin, stuck against a chest expanded with experience and fried bread.

Think strawberry granola and coffee.

The residue of lip stain on white china that served many a conversation

In the secluded corner of a coffee shop

Where two people first held hands.

Secretly, under the sticky table.

There were no hands now. Just eyes; four and all blue.

The clock started ticking again, and we aged,

And life went on and the parallel ghost train split away from my own and was

Momentarily illuminated by the lights of the city.

It could have been anywhere.

The woman sitting in the green seat opposite regarded me with curiosity.

I smiled back at her,

While the ghost-me did the opposite.