by Charly Cox
‘… What’s not there to be desired?’
It’s all a constant conflict
That speeds in every thought
When I don’t feel so great
It draws a pencil line above my head
Much shorter than before
It’s a voice that refuses to see growth
And then backtracks for a minute
And shouts that I’m taller than most
Sometimes I need it to hear my own stupidity
And sometimes it knocks a sizeable crack in my mental fragility
Sometimes it feels like an illness
And other times it feels like a super ability
When I’m alone it’s easy to forget I am
Because someone else is nattering away
And if I had control of at least one of these voices
I’ve got no idea what I’d say
But maybe, it would be
Right or wrong
Fat or thin
An inbetween of all these things
They’ll quieten down when you realise
You’re as strong to be so tough
To see that all of you’s
Enough.
wonder of worry
We become the wonder of worry
Greasy in apologies
Slithering around each other’s truths
In a perfect eight-shaped double-headed noose
Beer-foamed lips catch glints
And glisten sticky awaiting calm
That wills to be administered mouth to mouth
As hands cover eyes and fingers rest in their brows
We become the wonder of worry
Wandering straight-edged
Slack-lined, tongues untied, holding
On to strawberry-coloured embarrassed
Pink in the cheeks that we rouged from the tint of our hearts, hapless
In spirit and gesture
Cursing our history for being a chemical-stained mess
But as you hold me in the crook of your arm and kiss my bruised head
Our madness weighs a little less
The wonder of worry is
Teeth teetering trips of silence
Locked lockets swinging open unasked
Wittering over an expectation of now and love passed
Past a parameter to shut down
Slow down, bend down and under through branches we’ve extended
Piling them high and climbing to a peak of united front splendid
We become the wonder of worry
A little lost in the unexpected
But as we wonder together the worry becomes fragmented
Halved and shared and further afloat
There is a crescent smile on our lips
And there’s nothing left to clear in our throats.
amber meal
Wipe a slick of whiskey from your lips
The burning bitter now a tender kiss
It is a supper of divine, an amber meal
A glass to clink that dins out how to feel
And when we fall back together again
Which I’m certain shall be friends
against the odds
Please know
This crash
And cool of rocks is now my home
climb
Because you left me here to alone.
I thought it wicked
To offer out a space within you without offering its limit
To dilute down all the hours by leaving in a minute
I thought you wicked
But in a mess of this elixir
I still want you to see my splendour and lie within it.
unidentified businessman
Did you see his eyes?
The way he looked at me
I’ve seen that look before
In doctor’s receptions and caught them in glass door reflections
That inward moment you look outward to seek a connection
With yourself through someone else
Did you really see them?
Blink and you’ll miss it
A piece of ocean blue and an iris sunk in spirit
Querying a view of judgment so explicit
That you want to hold their two pearly glass pebbles
And extract all of their battled past trembles
And kiss it
Smooch the notion of their preconceptions
Cradle an ounce of the perfect they see as imperfections
And make them look the other way
Shoot back a glance
That knocks their sallow tin man stance
To ricochet
To hand on your heart hand over your heart just for a minute in his day
A head nod that doubles as a ‘I hope you’ll be okay’.
Did you see his eyes?
The way he looked at me
I’ve seen that look before
And selfishly I’ve greeted them by staring at the floor
Cracking a stranger’s reality into one that’s ignored
Walking on embarrassed and showing no remorse
All he wanted for a second was a moment out of the self-deprecated and absorbed
Moments we all live in
I saw his eyes and the way he looked at me
This time with no pause for thought or time to breathe
I looked down deep into those cerulean pools
Sighing a sympathetic offering of stealth
I saw the look in his eyes and there looking back was myself.
mind part 2
Sat upright in a bed that’s not your own, you syphon through packets of medication. You study each pill, piercing the foil carefully, listening to each pop, placing them delicately in your palm. They build and build until you cannot hold any more without them slipping from between your fingers and so you start to put them in your mouth. Powdery and metallic in taste, you let them fur on your tongue. You clench down your teeth.
Swallow.
There is no method here, no meditation, no ideal or thought-out end. You just do. You swallow and swallow and swallow until you feel your eyes pulse distorted black shapes onto the wall in front of you. What are you doing? You’re not sure. In its greatest irony this is the closest to alive you’ve felt in months. The power. The power that you’d thought these very things had taken from you now reclaimed in a moment of adrenaline-filled weakness. Your fingers and toes shake furiously, your heartbeat in your ears, your stomach dropping from higher storeys with each breath. You try so desperately to close your eyes, pushing your back slowly down the middle of the bed but they’re forced open. Stapled. Prized and widening with fear. What have you done? How did you get here? Why?
No answer sizzles to the surface, just aggressive acid reflux. Vomit. Most of it down your top and stuck in your hair. Nonplussed you are still here. Then, tears. Duvet-gagged screams. Anxious pleading text messages to recipients of such absurdity as you’ve forgotten who you have. If anyone might care. You stay awake for days. Leaving early in the morning you close the front door halfway as to not wake anyone and you slip off to a shopping centre. Zombie-like fingering through clothes that just hours ago you tempted to never wear again, you buy them all. Dresses, make-up, books. Laden with distraction. Eyes still pulsing. Body tested to its final limits. Still working. Still pushing. Still alive. You arrive home silent. Curtains drawn, own bed. Two slices of dry toast. Vomit, again. You wriggle down and shut your eyes. Inner monologue shouting verses of your stupidity, angry and abusive phrases others have given you stuck to your mind’s tongue, spitting it back as though it’s language you have bred. It’s not. Your phone vibrates. Anxiety. You haven’t dared to read the things that you had sent. The panic of others’ worry. The fear of who you may have hurt in hurting yourself. The gross indulgence of asking for help from someone so removed. Expecting someone to care. Your body writhes around in filth and shame. It is not until now that you realise what you’ve done. The weight of it all. The seriousness
. This act of punishment administered so nonchalantly that it evokes terror each time you remember it. Why did it feel so innate? Why was it so easy? If no obvious trigger, who’s to say the same again is not a sleepwalk away.
You open the message, it reads:
The reality you experience in your head is secondary and biased.
You are a beautiful and awakened young woman, you are valuable and bright.
Hope. Heart-banging hope. Help. Hell driven to it.
Weightless and alive again, if only for a moment.
Days that follow are shamed and long, you take up running to exhaust you.
More messages, same sender. Loud and authoritative, tender and persistent.
Nobody else knows where your brain has taken you but them. But you are here now, unmasked, accounted for, being pulled forward by a rope of desperate late night slobbering calls that without, you would have autopilot-slumped on the cold porcelain of a public bathroom.
There is not a night that passes where the words exchanged don’t help you. Ease you. Humanise you. They cradle your battered brain to vow you will do the same for someone else at any cost. In your greatest weakness, they battled for your strength. You are here now, unmasked, accounted for, alive.
inner gold
Soften the shards
That broke you clean
Fresh and angry
As though they seem
Can be rounded as gems
Handed as souvenirs
To those who are yet to find light
In your old rotten fears.
resilience
Novelty is such the mind’s addiction
Cravings for comfort
In things that breed emptiness
Feasting on feelings with the unfriendliest
faces
But what if we traded to take from different places?
If we nourished our souls in ways we deserved
And picked softer tools to tickle our nerves
Cradled our minds in a sip of a sauce of its own brilliance
And found novelty in our mind’s own source of resilience.
dysthymia
It is uncomfortable blunt language
No apology screens sincere enough
For the screams and swearing
Of what it’s made me do
It circles on my tongue
Bitter furs and tangs of acid
As I repent on how this thing
That I lost the remote for
Could ever make you feel
I didn’t love you
In the deepest way I could.
wrong spaces
Why does the guilt
Always hit so late?
Twist and rip
It breaks me in two
Still not half enough
Still too whole
To dive back into
Dizzying nausea
Fills me up more and
More
Spurting, bursting
All encompassed hurting
Still not half enough
Still too whole.
kindness
All that matters is kindness
I know it sounds obvious
But it’s true
Think of all the bad things in the world
And then think of you
Think about all of the troubles you’ve faced
And then think of all the kind faces
That pulled you through
It’s them that reminded
you of your power
And on the days you feel you’ve got little purpose
Remember as humans it’s as basic as showering
Others with kindness
Compassion
Lashings
Of love
Regardless of race, sex, location, and material stuff
It’s kindness in its simplest sense
That will take us from this dark present
Into a more hopeful, prospecting tense.
Your mind is biased
And your brain is blind
There’s still a store of strength
Left in you to find
she must be fat
body part 1
It’s April in London and you’re smiling at your feet. Toes jumping up and down gently, padding against the leather sole of wicker wedges. It’s your first day of your first job and the first time you’ve ever ordered a coffee. ‘Two skinny chai lattes please.’
A blonde woman, far too pretty to be fair, swings on her heels and reaches for a wooden swizzling stick. She looks like she’s got her shit together, she’s thin and tall and blonde and beautiful
and thin
and thin
and thin.
She’s so thin.
You wish you could stand in that frame, all collarbones and angled elbows, but you’re on the wrong side of 5’9” with rounded thighs and a well-cushioned overhang of tummy pressing out from your jeans. You squish it back in, smooth out your ponytail and walk half a block to work.
Everything is a clinical white, the walls, the backdrops, the shiny Apple Mac mouses, the lights, everything down to the people and their skin and the cyclical noise of clacking shoes.
You pick up the arm of a steamer and rush it over a crimson satin dress, tickling the long sleeves down its seams and knock on the dressing room door. Nervous.
‘Yah, I’m ready.’
It’s her and it’s you, her and her long-limbed body – naked from the waist up, tiny pert boobs meeting your eyes like pins pricking balloons.
She places her left hand on your forearm to balance, steps into the dress, and waits for you to zip it at the back.
When you get home you unzip yourself.
Knickers snake the legs of jeans that lay atop a faded Marks & Spencer’s bra, the underwire poking to catch the cuffs of your old favourite jumper. You drop your jewellery – weightless coppered rings that have left green replacements, thin golden chains, a hair clip pushing back your sweaty fringe. Off. Just in case. Deep sigh, deeper breath out. You arch your back forwards, you’ve forgotten your socks. Ankles embrace and tango to fling them off in a finale. Hopeful. Palms, cradling your stomach, there is more to give. ‘Have a quick wee.’ Just in case, deep sigh, deeper breath out, hopeful.
Standing as a body, rosacea and bruises that paint Rorschach marks across the backs of your goose-pimpled thighs, just pure, finite flesh, your toes lift and tip with trepidation from bathroom tile to the familiar cold white skin of the scales. A number flashes and flits, undecided, jumping between aggressive differences, innocent to the wait of the worth and the worth of the weight. Static digits. Staring. There is more to give. There is more to understand. There is more to remembering the woman with the coffees and the girl and her naked body, there is more to you than what you think there should be less of. But still, as weeks turn over months and these moments feel like impressing years, you forget again in these alone minutes and all you know of yourself is a number.
stuff
I think the thing that really gets me
The thing that turns me green
The thing that makes me really want to scream
Is if I took away the inches
The measurements, the weight
The half-cut-up potatoes
Left to grow cold on my plate
The thing that makes me angry
Makes me want to cry
Is I’ve always been much smaller
Than the way I’ve understood size
I’ve made up sticks of butter
That I’ve told myself I’m made of
And I’ve sold myself as bigger
Arched my arms wider than needed to cradle
This magnificent piece of magic
That keeps me all together
This stuff that I have pulled at
This stuff that I should’ve treasured
This stuff that in all these years
I’ve told myself is huge
> Has simply been the shape
Of the holiest refuge
With every time I look back
Sometimes only just a year
I wonder why I waddled with
This disgusting faulting fear
There was not that much of me
There was just enough
There was cellulite and thighs
But there was also just this stuff
This stuff that wasn’t ugly
This stuff that wasn’t big
This stuff that was simply just me
Stretching to a woman from a kid
This stuff that I don’t remember
Ever wishing there wasn’t less of
But as I’m getting older
I can’t stand it being the death of
My sense of reality
I only hope
I only pray
I’ll start to see
If I look properly
There’ll never be too much of me.
shoreditch house
She took one look at me and decided not to change her dress
Decided that even in her work clothes
They’d still serve further to impress
Him
The depression has started to kick in
I slipped in
To this
I slip into this
I slip in every time
She’ll kiss him
Without changing her dress
And I’ll kid her I’m still fine.
kale
Oh kale leaves
How you depress me
I only eat you
So boys want to
UNDRESS ME
kale reprised
(two years later)
I’ve been eating a lot of chips
To fill out the dips in my hips
That your fingers used to press
Nothing but a starving urge
To spill out of the silhouette
You’d once undress.
wrigley’s extra
The comparison’s a killer
So much so it’s gum for dinner
Why didn’t god birth me thin
The god I love lives in this house