i scare women's clothing

'She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
if I just turned and ran
And it wears me out
It wears me out
If I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted' -- thom yorke

Each morning I wake and roll into the emptiness, my hand reaching for a soft waist and a crumpled t-shirt that fails to materialise, I slip my arms around the invisible and clutch nothing but cloth. Each daylight she fails to dawn, and like yesterday, today and tomorrow continue. Until now... that is; the times have changed. The past five nights I have woken at 4am, wrenched out of my sleep by a butterfly of shadows, my eyes flipping open to find the silence of the empty space my only compadre. In the blue light of the dark I have lain there, passing a slow thirty minutes, weighing the pros and cons of taking a piss. And in this pause each night I wait for who or what has awoken me, for the cause and effect of the shift in the balance that has disturbed my dormancy. For good or for ill, I feel a presence hovering over my bed, holding a note, a handwritten scribble of love or betrayal just out of reach. And here I am failing to communicate, failing to make sense, failing to gain clue. Desperately I want meaning, I want patterns, I want excuses, whatever is required to avoid adding up the symptoms and depressing the equals key. Insomnia is one thing, broken sleep another, both another step down the line that ends swinging from a socket. And all I can hold onto is her. And she is all I can't let go. Her gestures are poetry, the flecks of her eyes form rhymes and couplets; I lay betrayed by my idolatory. I shall mourn her still longer, a gut twisting smoke that swirls and curls and fails to clear, that clouds and licks the stained glass of a fractious heart. Something is very wrong here. Tonight I shall set an alarm to wake and discover. If I am to lose sleep, let it be on my terms.

for gemma, with love and thanks for the paper