When you laughed and said that

All of Kodaline’s songs are hopeless,

and people cannot save us
I did not think about how
I have choked on every opportunity at love
and drowned countless plants in the names

of those who have left,
How the plants died soon after,

and how you will leave too; but,

This poem is not a metaphor

​

For why I refuse to let you go
or how a woman in Moscow
Described you as an almost-lover

of John Lennon,
Rather an ode to why
I traded my Oasis records
For the red in your cover of Plath’s Ariel,

​

How you met me in a

Post-Woolf fiction setting
in an August of burning

Battle cries on your melodica,
Why your laughter still inhabit places it should not,

Like beneath my tongue, everywhere, and
Everywhere?

​

Now listen, it is almost July,

and I still do not know my way out of you,
The colours of your eyes
Have now slipped through the holes in my pockets
Along with your memories.
Now, all that lingers after you are is

Your absence in the spaces you have left.
So, tell me, if I write about you 

In shades of your mahogany hair,

​

and imagine you in colours

I have never known,
Will you belong to me?

if you do not read this,

Whom would I belong to?