The One Before The First is a poetic autopsy of a love that never fully lived, but never really died. In this deeply personal collection, each poem is a shard of memory, tracing the slow, aching descent of someone awakening to desire, intimacy and love for the very first time.
This is the haunting of almosts: the texts that meant too much, the nights you couldn’t sleep, the illusion of being seen, and the brutal clarity that follows disillusionment. It’s about loving someone who gave you only fragments, yet somehow still took everything. Through bruised reflections and visceral, unflinching imagery, it speaks to anyone who’s been undone by a not-quite.
By the one who came before the first.
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Revived
It was like being revived from the dead,
like all my chronically numbed neurons
finally sparked to life inside my head.
Warmth like honey trickled through my brain,
and within just a second, that feeling
had oozed through every vein.
A decade of pent-up misery and dread
was drawn from my heaving lungs
that’d weighed me down like lead.
The constricting grip around my heart
slackened as you drew ever closer—
your very being was a tranquilizing dart.
You were still an unknown,
but some kind of primal recognition
told me your soul held part of my own.
The Right
I sat in Theatre Royal,
hands clasped tight
between my thighs,
as if to keep my entrails
from slipping out—
tears smarting in my eyes.
My sternum buckled,
ribs folding inward
like a cowering spider,
and you—so flip,
telling me you'd rowed the whole trip.
That’s the preference—strife?
Your ever-loving wife.
How unfathomably cerebral,
to remark I’d have loved the cathedral—
and have the gall
to ask if I’m wearing lipstick.
What a tactic.
And here I sit
with a pallid smile,
heart thumping with all its might,
and all the while
I debate if I even have the right
to feel this.
Clever Ghoul
We were just mooching about
in the bowels of the Castle Museum,
eyeing some ancient torture
and captivity devices used
back when York was still Eboracum,
when you stood and watched
my predicted morbid enthusiasm.
you said it wasn’t your idea of pleasure,
but it might be something
you’d attempt to overcome—
if I found it fun.
And then you went and said,
“I think… you have a deep-rooted desire
to control the cruel.”
And I was taken aback.
You really are one
remarkably clever ghoul.