Often in lonely cities I have longed for you-
with your hair longer than it is, paint on your fingers
tiny trails of half washed colour on my shoulder.
I have felt them, tiny circles on the skin
and in the mind where you are painting moons and
beer bottles, and your tiny teeth are sinking into me.
And I have longed for your postcards, your letters
and your black ink, swaying across waters
writing poetry to me. Leaving me wounded and burning
and wanting to shatter the mugs of dirty water
you never think to clean- I have dipped my fingers
into them and dreamed of you, when you were taller
and blonder and listening to not a word I'd say.
When I came to you with my guitar and a measley A4 sheet,
adolescent secrets sprawled in my handwriting,
my voice shaking and you sitting in the window,
daring not to say what I knew you should.
But I have longed for you in many doorways
and many windows, sitting there with your lip
swollen from tears and biting down the words you never said;
the paint staining your fingers and my shoulder.
They embarrassed me, all those people
walking in and out while we remained still,
staring at each other over miles of empty room,
my jeans still torn and your head still low.
Somehow I do not know how to make you understand
that this poem is about you- and that my words
are about you- and that no matter how many paintings
I burn, my work was about you, without you.

And in some puddle on some street somewhere
I see the rainbow reflected there, and as my breathing
staggers, and fails, lungs inflated like balloons
and I fall there on the pathway into some painting
where people bite on shoulders, and love was never
ever supposed to be this way- I think of you, and your
paint infected fingers, when your hair was blonder there
and you didn't really know how to say quite what you meant.

Ciara Burke is a 19 year old student from Navan. She has been writing amateurly and idealistically for almost six years, and still harbours aspirations of one day becoming Samuel Beckett. She is going into her third year of studying English, Media and Cultural Studies at IADT, Dun Laoghaire, and is in the process of creating her own literary zine for people who like spelling mistakes and adolescence.