She Must Be Mad: the bestselling poetry debut of 2018

baby ella (#litres_trial_promo)

adult (#litres_trial_promo)

seaweed – for grandad (#litres_trial_promo)

expectations (#litres_trial_promo)

yellow cabs (#litres_trial_promo)

hospital visits (#litres_trial_promo)

you will choose... (#litres_trial_promo)

acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

about the author (#litres_trial_promo)

about the publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

For the men who broke my heart, for the beta-blockers that slowed it, and a chunk of what is left to the sisterhood with a gift tag wrapped around it reading: let’s try and figure this all out together.

I owe this all to my madness and those who have suffered it. I never thought I’d be a poet. I never knew one day I’d slap a title on a cover that encased sometimes lonely and sometimes excited thoughts and say, ‘Here it is! A book of poems! By me, Charly … The Poet!’ But life shocks you and here we all are. In that never tense, I didn’t know a thing – I just knew how to feel. I took to feeling like a sport and I exercised every one of those achy heartstrings that had festered in cliché drivel until they snapped and aortic wells poured and shouted, ‘For god’s sake woman, can you just write these feelings down so we can have a break?’ And so I did. For years in silence and secrecy. I wrote these poems and letters to my past self and in every sort of melodramatic, romantic, ridiculous way, these are what saved me. Saved me from an intensity I was afraid to share until I morphed them into something to share with you now. Some of these were written at sixteen, others at twenty-two; they were all written growing and lost and sad sunk, but they were also all written with eventual hope. A hope that I clung to in the most intense way that only a girl desperate to take a peek at womanhood, battling a wealthy portfolio of mental health issues nervously, could. Finding strength in the contention of such frustrated confusion, in odd and debilitating sadness, in jubilant first kisses and clangs of clarity – in the words of our lord saviour Britney Spears, ‘I’m not a girl – not yet a woman’. And there is something truly quite almighty in that in-between … either that or, I must truly just be mad.

she must be in love (#ub5fd41ea-9e6c-5194-b9b7-c339c736a2d0)

love part 1 (#ub5fd41ea-9e6c-5194-b9b7-c339c736a2d0)

Nobody ever tells you that there’ll be comedians and poets, actors and academics, college students and forty-year-old men to fall in love with.

That you will fall in love with them all.

Their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign phrases, even the stray scratchy hairs on their cheeks and chins that will tickle like an acrylic yarn against your youth.

They first come soft. Soft and slow and ethereal, these perfumed clouds of promise that smell new but hang old, and then before a single tendril has had time to make itself at home on your collar, they exit loud and angry and too early.

They will always exit too early.

Little-to-no explanation, a hole so deep you lose your feet to the black and bleak of self-assumed guilt, he flings the door on its hinges for another man to oil and mend.

You’ll re-imagine hope until he leaves too, tarnishing his very own handiwork.

Nobody ever tells you of these good-looking silhouettes because they have stood in their cast before. They relished in the same way you will but they cowered in the flood.

They sunk with weakened limbs until they no longer knew of that initial burst and lay themselves down to surrender. You, however, will not allow yourself to be a casualty to love. You will grow stronger in it, if you try.

It’s six minutes past midnight, Facebook has updated Messenger, video now available, you have no one to call.

Soon, it’s twenty-one minutes past twelve and an unfamiliar noise rings through the hard plastic of your first laptop, it starts to screech. You look up and to the side, a rerun of the news now only important to your periphery.

A boy. It’s a boy.

A boy you’ve never met but whose life you know the lengths of. Holidays, parties, girlfriends, new friends, birthdays, likes, lunches – all arranged into bite-sized books you’ve read and torn pages from time and time again. The boy. The boy from the holidays and the parties, with the girlfriends and the new friends, he’s calling you.

You answer.

Spanking new anticipation twirling twines that tie knots in your chest, frayed ends tickling your stomach to stir hot queasy butterfly soup.

‘Hello.’ He says, monotone. Northern.

Eyes thinning to an embarrassed sleepy squint.

‘Hey?’ You say, a question. Southern.

Smile curving to bunch the bags from under your eyes to pillows.

‘Just wondered what your voice sounded like.’ He says, he smiles back.

‘Same. Now we know.’

Lights dim in both screens, you dissolve into the silence of each other’s nights, minds reaching out to touch the other, tousle hair, feel skin. Talk. Talk. Laugh. Smile.

Embarrassment has gone.

It’s five thirty-six in the morning four years later. Lights still dim, faces still rounded in the glow of the laptop. Girlfriends once stalked are now ex-girlfriends discussed. Holidays, planned as fleeting dreams of train journeys across the country to finally meet. Likes, shared. Sometimes agreed.

‘Do we know, or at least think, that if you lived down the road from me we’d be in love?’ He wrote.

‘Yes.’ You reply.

A life starts to lead along a parallel secret line, a life that’s yours and a line of fibre optics. Two years pass. You meet in a newsagent at a train station. He’s smaller than you thought. You’re fatter than he’d seen. Geography offers different greetings. Kiss, hug, release. You share pancakes but struggle to look at each other. You walk across Battersea Bridge, he lights a spliff, you sit facing away from each other and imagine you’re still just on the phone. Better.

Three years later and it has never happened again. You never found out if he became the poster boy for postmen in Salford. You never got to tell him of the new bosses and the trips to America. You never got to tell him all the things he was right about. You never got to tell him how your heart held out, how it still occasionally chooses to hold out. How in a life lived on a parallel secret line you never unplugged the receiver. But now you do. Now you get to tell him somewhere he might find it and can only hope he does, before he finds someone else.

to you (#ub5fd41ea-9e6c-5194-b9b7-c339c736a2d0)

This feels silly to write

For in doing so

The sentiment fractures

And goes back full circle

But I’ve kissed plenty of boys

Most of them charming

I’ve kissed plenty of boys