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tell your friends i give good smile and i’ll hear she thinks i’ve been nicer these last few weeks i wasn’t there
i never used to be anyway
pacing the just misted rooms of lives i’ve never lived voices floating more disaffected than their speaker would dare
parade yourself painless
told myself i wasn’t drinking tonight.
drawing maps in snail trails on bodies left unsaid
but i’ll know when you tell me you’ll feel like you have to dribbled into a corner on an unplayed pitch the same colour as caffeine i only speak the universal language of people we’ve never met who hold what we used to want
i write stories under the shadow of the rain.
waves of sodium tolling over a dulling skin
you will learn how beautiful it is to drift in the silt lukewarm autumns pretending to be drowsy
now i beg the streetlights to flood me
the absence whispered as i missed
the leaves don’t dream in the gutter
my butterflies died yesterday
by the light of ambulances
but it’s alright i know i’m not your problem.
how many times can i want to start again
we heard the sirens they told us to keep going
tell your friends i give good smile
dragged myself into the harsh light of what you don’t own the cost sticking to my fingers as blue as my jacket drink yourself back to the 17-year-old you never were
but now the trains keep time again
i have no reason to sleep
but i would dream that this was what i wanted
tell your friends i give good smile
even though i’ll never see them again
drawing aching pictures at the top of the stairs
antiseptic postcards written in piss-stained glitter
she said he thought i was better yesterday
i just wish he was right
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2. |
Internal Exile
05:20
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i don’t have your religion but being born again every morning’s a waste of time
but then i never thought we were the kind to have children
and i don’t pray but i silently scribble my bile on the walls before I go to bed
dawdling over hangovers that just remind me that I’m not almost 19 again
you know you were always happier when you thought you were
but i wander the living rooms of lost innocence pretending I like the clothes I wear
reimagining how my lips would dry from being closed too long
breathing even deeper when i look in the mirror
listlessly dreaming about an easy drowning-in-warm-soapy-water domesticity
but if you ask her she’ll tell you i’m still sulking
dripping in someone else’s burial shroud and wishing myself lovesick
do you remember when you woke up again and it wasn’t clutching at your skirts?
drape me in the clothes you bought out of necessity because you’d grown older
and watch the autumn breeze flinch as it hits my lungs again
i can’t tell you if it’s too late
you wouldn’t listen anyway
i just want to go home
but i couldn’t say how many times i’ve been
stopping and starting over and over
clutching at what could never have been mine
a list of objects drifting further away
to be collected to be lost again
i still remember the things I wasn’t supposed to hear
drifting through my bedroom wall
but now all i know is what used to be
dying when the sun comes too late
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Red Rosa London, UK
A post-punk band from South London.
Thomas Whittaker
Ben Tudor
Edward Wilson
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