they were always amy. mon amie. my amy, my friend. except they were not my friends. i thought they might be, for a while. they too were poety. lonely, they said. but their loneliness was latent and tasteful. their loneliness became them, was a zeitgeist and a style. they listened to kate bush. they wore vintage dresses, and thrifted for crystal decanters. my own distress was both scrappy and drab. it shoplifted, kicked off, and stunk up the place. to read what they’d written gave me a tight feeling, like i wanted to hit somebody. i’d work myself into a rage: how nice for you to have lost things, as distinct from having them taken away. loneliness, i came rapidly to the conclusion, was just one more thing that stupid, smelly poor people were unable to do. because they certainly did do loneliness. we – i – merely had it. i did try. in fits and starts. but could only be thwarted, frustrated, my silly overtures rebuffed. i didn’t know why. until one day it dawned on me that they had monopolised even the meaning of loneliness, that i had been gentrified out of my feelings until nobody could recognise them. or my right to them at all. theirs was a kind of dry, sophisticated melancholy. mine staggered and oozed. raw. rancid. the nerve in a knuckle, open and exposed. because i was ugly. no match for the amies, whose loneliness was loveliness, the warrant of their superior sensibility. earthly evidence of exceptional soul. amies, wafting about like gothic heroines, immortalising themselves in sweetheart necklines and soft fabrics. loneliness the conceit, and loneliness the confection. theirs is an identity, mine is an illness, or a dirty political fact. close myself up in this room. as a worm blooms inside its duvet of moist fruit, so too my loneliness – unacceptable poem.