Time Travel in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

The last words of a child, immortalised; the age-faded graphite burns jaded red eyes: I’m watching my own suicide.

In every painful paragraph I’m reading my own epitaph, a twisted-spiral eulogy to youthful opportunity, the words now blurred on ageing pages, seeing my life destroyed in stages: a horrified, hollow-eyed, helpless spectator, my heart blown apart by this teenage narrator; unwitting dictator of all that I am, holding my world in the palm of her hand.

It’s a gun-barrel time-tunnel into the past and I’m slamming my palms against twelve years of glass; the pain stains the pages of every vignette, my throat burns in forest-fire flames of regret as I swallow myself playing Russian Roulette, with a slew of dark forces and slick silhouettes: and strung up by her neck, a sick marionette.

And I’m drowning in an acid sea- of misery and memory- empathy and jealousy are ripping strips of skin from me; caustic, corroding, eroding my mind, a wrecking-ball echo through mirrors of time. Flashbang, flashback- skull-shattering rattling thundercrack- the dark desecration and stark devastation a petroleum sunrise, a bankrupt dawn, I’m watching self-destruction born- in caesarean scars, torn up long-ago arms- the creation of obliteration, clawed into existence: an evisceration.

Every bloodied fingerprint that blurs those words of faded ink is a meeting of selves in sickening sync, the present one seeing the past on the brink, across acres of ages yet still interlinked; the blindside of hindsight, running barefoot and tripping, the sands of time rippling, the heartbreak is crippling, the poison-air thickening, choked panic-breath quickening; my whole life is a lie, I just watched myself die, gouging blood from my palms inside foetal-curl fists: I don’t know how to breathe through this.

And still, I long to feel whole- to stuff my worthless forcemeat soul- back inside that scarred skeletal frame, I want to wear those bones again- I hate her, she killed me, I need her, she’s still me; I want to erase her, I wish I could save her: I still fucking crave her- a spiral confusion, a ravenous, cavernous canyon of pain; myself, laid to waste, a whole future erased, those mis-steps still retraced, endlessly, relentlessly: those mistakes were the end of me.

That addictive behaviour, my ruinous saviour; rewrite it, remix it, I still cannot fix it: I’m the body of proof, a decree absolute....

the dying words of my youth

forever since: my whole truth.