The Wrong Kind of Unafraid

I do not fear the things I should. The things that scare me are quiet, a heaviness in the back of my throat with tendrils that curl around my tongue and stop me speaking, and creep down into my chest and squeeze my heart until it's hard to breathe. They could kill me; not a physical death, but an emotional one, wiping away hope.

I cannot be a wild thing, for I cannot love without abandon. I could stand on train tracks and watch the train speed towards me, but what use is that if I cannot give my love as easily as I could give my life? You see, this is why I need you. I need someone to teach me how to be unafraid.

Soul Tar

Once, I sat in the darkness, contemplating the corners of my soul, reaching tentative fingers and dipping them into the black tar found there, cementing the walls of me together. I find now that the tar had been cleaned off my fingers, and the feel of it has fled from my mind, to hide in some other distance place. But the tar, neglected in its loneliness, twisted itself into tendrils, and climbing up the walls of my body, attached itself to the bottom of my skin, pushing ever upwards to grasp the taste of air. Now my fingers itch, and they grapple with the pen, struggling across the surface of a sheet of paper, turning a blankness into a representation of the tar's whisperings. And when it is done, it whispers further, and the words get written down across the bottom of the illustration, a tribute to the cynical; an expression of the tar.

This. Always This

My heart hurts. The time, it's ticking by, forging a path, despite my hands which grasp to hold it. My heart hurts. It's all going. The light of the future isn't as bright as the burning of the past. Nostalgia for the present I'm not living beats at my chest. By the time the day closes on us, and the world returns to their respective nests, I'm still going to be here, alone.

Pick holes in me and my love will all fall out. But that's ok because nobody wants it anyway. They all glance, look away, keep walking. I'll sit here until someone wants to sit by my side. If I fall off the seat and I can't get back up, I hope someone will pick me up and carry me home.

I need to know my faith in humanity isn't unfounded. Someone be the person I want them to be.

Love, Love, Love

What do they know of love? What does anybody know? Could they look you in the eye and tell you that they know what it's like when they're urging to you to give away pieces of your soul?

Do they know of its smell? Old vanilla and dust. Do they know of its looks? Creased spines, yellow pages, and covers scuffed away at the edges. Do they know of its touch? Fragile pages brushing as light as a butterfly wing against tips of fingers. Do they know of its sounds? Cracking spines and the flutter of pages.

Do they know of its wisdom? Passed down from person to person like secret whisperings. Do they know of its freedom? Displacing you into another realm, another life. Do they know of its comfort? Empathy, tragedy; the food for human souls. Do they know of its commitment? It never leaves while you are like to need it. Do they know of its love? Bearing you when you might drown, and even when you might not.

What do they know of love?
 They who urge you to part with old friends, who say "you have no room for others!".
What do they know of love?
Nothing. Those who recognise it would never say "give them away!".

Winter Souls

Winter is coming, I can taste it in the air. The cold will bring relief, it will cool the passion building inside. The burning will stop, the yearning stop scorching my heart, and I shall be able to breathe once again, the way I used to before; before I ever laid eyes on you, in the heart of summer.

Honey, we all have souls to save, and I need something to save mine from you.

But with the winter comes the dark, walking hand in hand with loneliness, which will scratch at old wounds till they burst open and bleed again. I would that you were there to kiss them closed. Would you come and hold me close and whisper comforts in my ear while the rain falls outside, drowning the whole world? Would you chase away those shadows which threaten to damn me?

We cannot all be saved, but I hope that you could try.

How I Disappear

Only partially there; has anyone even noticed? Slowly, I'm disintegrating, giving myself to you, tiny pieces breaking away from my skin, floating away on the wind, seeking your body, trying to find a home in your heart. Could you open the door before I beat my fists bloody against it? Before I disappear completely? I feel your eyes meet mine and I know that there's a chance. All those bits of me that are banging on your door are the promises I'm making to you. Soon there'll be nothing left of me, only promises and hopes that you and I will fall into this thing called love, still somewhat a fable to my skeptic's mind. But I'm sure I could believe in it if you were to take my hand and show me.

I'll press my fingertips slightly into your skin, the only points of pressure between our two bodies, but we'll not need more, for our eyes will be locked. I'll drown in the depths of yours. I'll skim my fingertips down your arm, caressing your skin, skating across it, afraid to break the fragile moment. You'll smile; my heart will flutter. You'll lean close and press your lips to mine, and we'll find ourselves in the midst of that fairytale land.

We need a beginning, and I cannot while away behind this invisible wall of fear as neither of us take the steps which will lead us to something more. We cannot be errant leaves on a breeze forever. I want to find my home. I want to know if you could be mine. It's hard to be someone, but I could do it for you. Let us take our chances?

Roulette

What is this? An epiphany? A disappointment? A salvation? Or a damnation? To feel alone as ever, standing on the street corner, watching the world go by, wondering how easy it could all end with only one step into the oncoming traffic. This, this is what loneliness does. It has not the dark glamour of the films, nor any of the beauty of the poems. It is a leech, draining you of life, slowly, surely, killing you. It would be easy to end it. It would be too easy to let it win.

The snow falls. My paper flutters. Her eyes say nothing. My heart sinks, breaks, disintegrates. I lose. She loses. We all lose, in this game. Take a breath. Start again. Or walk forward and never play again.

My Sin, My Soul

It seems there is no way of knowing what you want to know; to ask would be too forward, too against social propriety. To ask would be rude.

Leaps, leaps and bounds are what we ought to be taking. Leaps and bounds are exactly what we're too afraid of trying.

For the first time, I feel like I know what I want in my life. But I cannot; and in the absence of you, I have my tears, I have my sorrows, I have my wretched loneliness. I do not wander as lonely as a cloud, for clouds seem content in their loneliness. No; I wander as lonely as a fog, descending on the earth simply to be close to what it can never have. And the city which once used to ignite happiness within me, now only sparks more sorrow, as the buildings pierce through my skin, reminding me that they stand together, while I walk alone.

This Road

One day I'll look back on this road and wonder why I took it. I'll wonder how I fell in love with every bend, with the very feel of the gravel, with the past and the future, stretching out in both directions. I won't be able to give a definite answer, but I'll have one, tucked away, hidden from sight, in the dark corners of my mind.

The answer will always be the same: I thought it was the road which would bring me to you.

Bookshelves

You've been there, countless times, head cocked to one side, looking for something; hoping for something? The opportunities arise, they dance tantalisingly in front of me, little imps crying in high pitch mocking voices "catch me if you can", but I cannot reach out and take them. They dance into the distance, laughing in delight in my regret as you walk away, gone until the next time, where the process is done again. Rinse. Repeat.

You appear so close. My brain knows that the time is now, but my chest tightens until I cannot breathe, my hands lose all strength, they shake, weakened by the sight of you. Words congeal in my throat, stoppered; I cannot speak to you. There is a moment, a pause, every cell in my body screaming at me to take the next step forward, to take the next breath, no matter how much it hurts, to force out the words, no matter how impossible. I look away. The moment dies. You leave. I'm left, standing among the stacks, breathing in the scent of books, feeling the sympathies, the disapprovals of the people inside them. They seem to whisper 'you could have done it. Why didn't you do it? One day she won't come back.' as if I didn't already know that I might not get another chance. I whisper back 'I'm sorry. I can't.' and they all shake their heads in disappointment; Elizabeth Bennet who doesn't understand what is so difficult, Jane Eyre, who sympathises, knowing that relationships must wait for the right moment, and Heathcliff, who angers as he thinks of all these lost moments, how he would not have wasted them. I turn my back on them and stalk out of the aisle, standing where I can see you, brushing your dark hair out of the way, tucking it behind your ear; the gesture I've seen a thousand times, but would see a thousand more, so endearing it is.

I sigh and turn away, regret like an acid in my stomach, burning a hole of shame and disappointment through my middle. My feelings drip out, pooling on the floor in a pitiful puddle, all longing and shyness and disappointment. One day my life will spill out with those feelings, and I'll convulse, lying on the floor in the feelings I couldn't express. The murmurs of the books will be my epitaph. People will stop and stare, and say 'that poor girl who died from too much unexpressed love' and you'll look over and wonder what the commotion is, but won't come to see. You won't know that I died because I fell in love with you among the bookshelves.

Walk Alone

Four walls are four too many, too closed to the world I must quietly tread. Four walls amplify the artificial sounds shrieking from ever-growing boxes with flickering screens. Four walls push down all the feelings I must rip out of me. 

What I need is a walk, a stroll through the suburban streets, stalking from shadow to shadow, flitting through the yellow puddles of light. I need to flirt with the stars, asking them to help me purge myself; I need them to help me articulate what I feel. I need to be alone.

Foggy Midnights

Don't we all dream of foggy midnights and puddle reflections? Of hazy clouds of luminescence and quiet towns? Don't we all dream of life, simple, easy, where daring is never difficult or prone to going wrong, and fun is easily found?


Don't we all dream of lives we'll never have?

Light. Dark.

Slowly consuming, a disease eating from the inside out. Sweet intoxication fuelling this demise. I wouldn't stop it, not for the world. Though in the face of one door opening, a million others have closed, my mind narrowing its focus to a singular point, I would not give it up; I could not. This is the darkness with a single ray of light, this is the taint on a clean sheet, this is the torture we put up with for pleasure.

I want to lie on the floor with this feeling, basking in a thin sliver of sunlight streaming through the dark. I want to stare at the dust particles which swim through the air, caught in the gaze of the sun. I'll sigh, wistful. Maybe I'll lie there forever. Maybe that's what happens to those who start to fall in love in the dark - they're all burnt to cinders in the sun, forever doomed to float heartbroken through the air.

Luminescence, Love, and Longing

Luminescence, a glow in a dark place. Isn't that what we all find so attractive, the light at the end of the tunnel? The curtains of light in the sky on a pitch black night?

Of course. But that is not all. It's the magic that it entails, the terrifying, yet soothing notion that there is something beyond, something bigger, something that can force us to sit down and appreciate; something akin to dreams coming true. It's like being in love. It's like catching your eye unexpectedly, and feeling the guilty pleasure spread from my chest to warm even the extremities of my body. It's like knowing that you're watching, and trying to be nonchalant and impressive all at once. It's like the anxiety of wondering whether any of it is working.

If I can fall in love with the stars from a distance, if I can fall in love with fireflies in a black forest, if I can fall in love with foreign sunsets, or in love with white rifts of lightning, then who's to say that there isn't a chance that you might fall in love with me?

Breathless Moments

Incredible, is it not, that something so fleeting can inspire something so remarkable? Yet this is who we are; people staring out through windows at the lives of other people, imagining ourselves elsewhere, the heroes of our own adventures.

It's sad, wouldn't you say, the way life seems to evolve? One could almost say it devolves. We begin as children, the heroes and action figures of the stories of our lives. We turn backyards into faraway planets, living rooms into battlefields, and our bedrooms into castles and forts. We grow. As teenagers we sink into a state of feeling; everything cuts more sharply, colours blind, emotions are rampant and occasionally toxic. As teenagers, we bare the souls we shall seem to lose as we mature; as teenagers we are the generation who feel that we grew old before our time. We mature. We settle into a pattern of life, and like water which flows along the same path for years, we carve a niche into the world. The world fades from a hub of colour and excitement, where everything can be imagined as something else, to a world where everything is the same, and we ourselves are as indistinguishable from one another as ants are to us.

Sometimes, in those rare moments of pause, when life is not consuming us, we find that we are alive. We stare out the window at the rain or the snow, at the leaves as they turn, or as the traffic as it rushes by, and we are taken aback by the breadth of life. Suddenly, we feel small, tiny, a speck of dust on the planet's surface; but the smaller we feel, the more aware we are, the more alive. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment for us to remember that there is possibility after all, that we are allowed to admire the rain, or surrounding architecture, or the life of someone else, recorded in breathless images across the pages of a book.

Tyranny

Somehow they manage to forget the important things in life when they're teaching you how to live; they neglect to mention that innocence is corrupted, that happiness does not last forever, and that sometimes, a situation is not all black and white. But the worst thing they ignore in their mundane outlines of life, is that love is a tyrant, gripping you in its impossibly suffocating grasp and killing you slowly.

It consumes your every thought as you descend into its abyss, which promises happiness, but seems to bestow more misery than it absorbs. It infuses you with passion, a lust for life, an impatience for everything you knew before, until, palms itching, body burning, breath labouring, you stumble outside, compelled to kiss your lover, to paint with furious brush strokes, to write in an untidy scrawl; you can escape it no more than you can escape the skin which stretches over your bones.

Love is a tyrant, an unrelenting ruler, never wavering from its demands, but as you obey, it rewards. It may twist and pull you, and poke you and torture you, driving you over the brink of madness, but when you look back to that time Before, it seems that you have since accomplished great deeds. Passion is the only cure for the insane, and though your madness drives you to lie naked beneath the stars, it is love, the grateful tyrant, who urges you to take the moment and immortalise it; thus ideas become revolutionary, thus do emotions become poems, and thus do the stars live on for eternity in art. Thus do the dreamers live.

Gangrene

There's no such cure, is there, as the one I seek? No opiate to sooth, no morphine to numb; no hallucinogen to make me dream of another place.

Drip. Drip. I'm so hollow inside that you can hear the obscene echo of my thoughts as they melt from my brain, pooling into a noxious waste somewhere near your feet. But you don't care. To you they're beautifully, but tragically tainted - a puddle with an ugly streak of oil which casts pretty colours if you happen to look the right way; fleetingly beautiful, but ultimately hideous.

Don't look too hard; you might see that these words are rotting - bleeding ink looks like gangrene, all purple and black and green. Tragically, disgustingly beautiful; and utterly wasted on you.

Star Paradox

I wonder if stars ever stare down at the earth and hope that someone is looking back at them. If you were a star with such thoughts, I would fight with every last breath in my body to show you that you are seen, that you are admired, and that you are loved.

You possess a quiet beauty, a subdued radiance, shining through in unguarded moments and lighting up the shadowy places in my heart. With the barest flicker of a glance, you stoke the flame of hope in me. Hope is a ruinous, beautiful paradox; strong and strength-giving, but fragile; uplifting, but heartbreaking. With the barest flicker of a glance you empower me as you destroy me.

But such is the way with stars; enchanting from afar, but dangerous too close. Still, I would swim through the Milky Way to find the one which is you.

Eye of the Storm

There's a painful calm in not knowing how things will go. It tears at your chest and weakens your muscles till you can't even fold your fingers into a fist; there's no fighting it. Everything blurs by, bright and mocking, never still, never clear, and you sit at the centre, the eye of the storm, watching it pass, unsure of how to proceed from where you are. Too afraid to get caught in the rush, too restless to sit by and do nothing. Too young to be so tired.

We Who Walk

Wrong side of the tracks, that's always where we seem to walk, apart from the rest of the pack. But throw caution to the winds, we don't give a damn. We'll be who we'll be and not lose any pride to those who try to tell us how to live. We'll love who we love, we'll do what we do. And all the while we'll try make sure our hearts are in the right place.

The Latern Graveyard

Well, I'm sorry I took a breath for a moment of wishful thinking. I'm sorry that I let my mind wander. I'm sorry that I allowed hope to stir within my chest. I'll lock it away, hide it in the graveyard of lost causes in my heart, and pick myself up from the disappointments, brush loneliness from my clothes, and take another tour of the cemetery, looking out for someone who might spare me some sympathy, or some love. I'll leave a candle burning in a lantern for you, dear, and walk in the light which mingles with that from those other flames, already hung, old and dim; illumination to a brighter future.

Thief, Giver, Executioner

Sleep. Sleep, come, arrest from my soul the things I would not miss - memories of long lost friends, whom I could offer no more sympathy for their hardships than congratulations on their successes, steal away moments idled away in days and months and years, and with them those moments when someone's opinion crossed the line from hopeful to contemptuous. If you should want times of false self importance and narcissistic resolve, then they too are yours.

But take not the loneliness, or the invisible scars rent by the clawed fingers of another's ego, the giver hiding behind anonymous bricks and latticed windows. Those things I shall keep. And take not the moments of achievement following self pity, nor the gratitude and relief which follows the completion of a great work. Take not those times which shaped me.

And if that be the case, take nothing from me at all, for I would not be who I am without them. Therefore, one final request, my dear slumber: render unto me the visions which ease my tormented days as they resurface in snatches like time lapse photography. Leave me with everything, slowly fading behind the transparent curtains as the ivy uproots the mortar.

The Incredible Journey

Pack your bags, your old battered trunk, and wait for me by the side of the road in your red beret. We'll go away, anywhere, disappearing into the haze of heat rippling into the horizon, a couple of dreamers with no direction and active imaginations to match. We'll curl up together in cheap motels and complain about terrible food; we'll take the long road, explore antique shops and stop wherever we want, snapping photographs on old film cameras.

It doesn't matter that we don't know each other very well, or that we've exchanged more glances than words. I want to walk the forgotten places of the world with you, and trace my finger along the length of your arm as we lay among tall grass, the crickets the only orchestra we know. We shall learn each other as we learn the country, the sky and the stars; we shall learn each other as we learn ourselves. You only need say yes.

The Vast, Lonely Universe

Solitude. A single dot in the vastness of space. Staring at the beauty that surrounds, there's a sense of wonder, an awe, but mingled with it is a heart aching loneliness. It is one thing to wave cheerily at the stars, and quite another to be part of them. Luminescent clouds of dust and radiation wouldn't be so heartbreaking if there were someone to sit by my side and gaze at them with me.

All alone in the universe, single specks, all alone. How can it be that there are so many who are lonely, and yet will not come together to alleviate the pain? How can it be that my hand will sit empty when we all want someone to find our own?

Our City

The future, can you see it? You, me, and the city of lights, burning brighter as we learn its depths. Regal buildings which guard the streets, history embroidered with revolutions and elegance, waste and creation, and a pull, playing the melody of dreamers on our heartstrings, inviting us deeper, securing our place within its landscape; the carnival with no escape; the carnival with no need for escape - it is escape. In the dying light, as the sky turns to purple, we'll shout it from the rooftops: "We are home!", and the blue and yellow lights will ignite the city, consuming it in glowing, incandescent fire - a welcome parade better than we could have dreamt. We shall revel in the celebrations, the lights dispelling our fear, our apathy, our foolish nonchalance, dragging us into joy, pure and whole, and better food for the soul than the melancholia we are so used to consuming. Together, we shall drown in the pool of lights and stake our claim on the city of dreamers.