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Was there ever an artist who made lists? The answer lies with you and your numbers. You tell me these are the best days of my life? Your life. Are they so separate now? You're counting words in the backroom- "77, 78, 79". You don't know I've kissed a girl in that chair - a smile played about her lips and I bit down on it gently.

There is a day in some less shapeless life when they tell me you are dead. It is heavy and unyielding like a bookend or the ending of a book. Then I will cry bitterly, but now I want to run from you and your numbers. I know you won't have missed a single one. You never do.

Men at parties tell me you are beautiful. I am scared for them. It is dangerous to be so right and so wrong all at once. What's that song you are playing? When you are dead I will want to remember.

I am always so full of the wrong emotions. Give me one reason to stay and I promise I'll lose myself in the art of it. Simplicity? A fairytale. You are good at them, I'll give you that. Me, I'm stuck in a colourful kind of no man's land. Don't stand to close to the edge, don't talk to strangers, don't take your life in your hands. You placed it there yourself in a gush of blood and relief - who am I to blame for the way I hold it? Here in my danger zone, your voice has no right to warn me of things that I dare to love - "You've three minutes, hours, years."

Somewhere, there's a girl I will dream about and wake up twisted and fraught. Unnatural passions, original sin. Does she want me? Harsh are your reminders - "It's twenty to three!" - how dare they infiltrate my no mans land. I'll laugh at a joke tomorrow that I won't remember. Will you?

You are safe, they are safe, everyone in the world is safe, but I up here in my danger zone know you are all wasting time and money and life on your mirrors and mortgages. The window frame paintwork across the street from where I sit is ancient and cracked and picturesque. I feel more akin to it than to you.

You speak of fallen glamour. I can picture you best in a cold empty palace in Russia, that ghost of grandeur, with only your self pity to keep you company through the winters, a laughing stock if ever you had let anyone close enough to laugh, making calm to-do lists on the back of a love letter written to you long ago by someone who is not my father who could have made your life good, counting the minutes, days, years, until you find something you didn't know you'd lost, tapping one stilettoed foot patiently, wondering when I'll be home to play gooseberry to you and your numbers.