The Wrongness of Reality

Something sits on my chest, heavy, suffocating. Have you ever stopped and thought about something you'd always taken for granted? Did you ever realise how much of things you invented in your own head? That is what this is - it's a realisation, and it's slowly killing me. That's what I get for making things up, without a shred of proof that they exist as I imagined. The mind creates perfect people - why stop it? Except for the fact that reality will set in and shatter everything you thought, nothing can go wrong.

Draining

No. No one gave you the fucking right. No one bequeathed upon you the monarchy, the dictatorship; no one gave you permission to be a tyrant. You do not have a say in how people run their lives. Look the other way, it's the only thing you're good at. Go on, walk away, I beg you. But you won't, will you? Because you think you have the right to stay and demand things of me, you think you have the right to tell me how to live my life; you think you have the right to make choices and assumptions about me when you don' t know the first fucking thing. Don't pretend it's love; don't masquerade it as something it's not, because it's a lie that doesn't sit too well with the truth. You're power hungry; one day I'm going to let you starve.

A Lamentation of Parting

I tremble with my lamentation, recognising that I live is a state of perpetual yearning, unrequited, unknown. What chance do I have? I shall merely sit by the wayside and watch yet another one slip from my grasp. She'll leave an invisible scar on my heart, and a piece of her will never leave, even as she follows the road to another destination. Nostalgia already knocks on my door, asking to be let in, but I'll have none of it while I still see her, even if I am scrambling for scraps.

Unshakeable Lies

"Where are you right now?" she breathed against my ear.

I found I could not explain that I walked a thousand miles away, along an abandoned road to nowhere, chasing dreams and visions from my mind, which danced before me, tantalising and alluring. I could not say that I was lost in a place untouchable, for that place did not really exist. I dared not shatter a moment deserving of more attention than I was giving it. So I leaned close and looked into her eyes. I took her hand and I whispered "right here".

The Subordinate Hours

Sleep, dreamer, sleep. Fall away into another world, a realm of infinite possibility. Keep yourself there as long as you can; don't face the waking world with regret. Stay strong, your day will come when you shall lie amongst the dew covered grass, staring up at the cobwebbed sky, clasping hands with your lover, the one who walks in your dreams, open, unabashed, lovely. That time is creeping, slowly, ever so slowly, but even the slowest travellers must arrive sooner or later. Until then, dreamer, sleep.

Places

Sometimes I feel as though I belong in another place. There is an irritation, a persistent tide in my heart, gently tugging me away to distant shores. They lie out of sight, over a horizon I cannot touch, but they claim my heart, my soul, my dreams; they are a waking nightmare, a too-good fantasy. If I can wake up tomorrow a different person, then why is it I cannot wake up in that homely place?

Invited Words

 

 Come, tell me that you want to watch, that you want to fall, that you want to fly. Tell me that you want to lie above the world and stare down at a city full of artificial stars, while the real ones blink on from above. Tell me that you wish you could whisper sweet words into a lover's ear. Tell me that you wish she were me.

Tell me, and I'll endeavour to do anything to please you.

Debt

Quit your sulking. The world doesn't owe you anything. We're all just bees, buzzing out and about, in and around the things which will profit us, only so we can bring it all back and give it to the Queen that is Capitalism. You don't own a thing; everything owns you. Love is just a side project to feed your soul - unimportant in the big picture of sustainability. It breaks your heart, and maybe you can't handle it, so you throw yourself off a bridge, but it doesn't make a difference; some other bee will take your place, the hive will continue to thrive, and you'll be just another memory in a graveyard of sodden thoughts. So keep it together if you want to make a difference. Remember, the world doesn't owe you a fucking thing.

Dying

Take one stumbling step, and then another. Shuffle forward, inch by trembling inch, facing down the things which want to break you. Isn't that what we're supposed to do?

But no, we sit along the sidelines, watching people play a game we long to get chosen for, but never understanding the rules. So we sit. We watch. We weep.

We're just living to die.

Unsanctioned

I don't deserve those things of beauty; light filtering through the trees, a brush of fingertips across a bare stomach, murmurs of a sleepy afternoon. No, those things melt out of my grasp, fleeing like roaches from the light.

Alone, I've become unstuck, wading through a life without a hint of buoyancy. All I'll get is grit under my fingernails, and bruises across my face for all the work I've done. All I'll keep are harsh words and hate, cancer cells of black bitterness taking me over from the inside. Goodness. What is goodness? Good things don't happen to crazy people. No one is going to care about the dregs of life, those people who are so abandoned by society that they abandon themselves. We'll all careen through the streets like ghosts until the whole city is a ghost town.

Wonderland

Things. They all collide and writhe and merge into one teeming mess of life. Not one thing happens, but millions, together, simultaneously, shaking the earth with their forces, rocking, quaking, shattering, until there is nothing but billions of pieces of ourselves scattered across the ground, falling away into the mass, to collide and merge and be reborn again. A death, a life, one with a foot on either side, trying to decide which to be.

Blood, the nature of life, spilled in birth, stilled in death, brought to the surface, red, hot, steaming even though it rises from a hollow heart. A staggering hope, a wistful illusion, a fleeting whisper on the breeze of a possibility, which flits down the street and darts out of sight when you try to get too close; a shadow from a flickering candle. Untouchable. Unreachable. Unforgettable. An education.

And all the pieces of ourselves, the things which let us be, wriggle and writhe, struggle and slither, determined, damned, broken, dragging themselves across a burning carpet of razor sharp memories. And bruised, bleeding, weary, they launch themselves into one another, colliding with another earth shattering crunch; the heavens vibrate, hell shudders, the earth sighs. A birth, a death, a life lived staring both in the face, accepting that that is how it must be. A relief.

Synecdoche

We can't help but get lost in the things we feel, brought on by some external stimulus, getting into our bloodstream, raking its claws against our heart, leaving us to bleed out from the inside. We start to live for a moment, an action, a scripted line, to satisfy the interest, poisonous and fetid, which festered within our chests when we were looking the other way. When it comes, our heart breaks, the best kind of pain, tearing us to pieces, but only the pieces of us on the surface, floating to easily be reassembled only to be broken again; we're like the adolescents, addicted to dragging a blade across their skin, because it heals to be cut again, addicted to the feeling, the synecdoche of one pain standing in for another. We're all just minds and bodies, caught in a tide of mutual suffering, brought together by the release of it with our addiction; I, no less than you, and you, not less than them. We're all hiding. We're all running. We're all terrified to face an obvious truth.

Stockholm Syndrome

It's a very tiny flutter, starting somewhere in your navel, the softest brush of wings. Then higher, an insistent flapping on the left side of your chest, in that area you'd always thought was hollow. This, my friend, is what they call "Hope" and you too shall be caught in its web of invisible but unbreakable filaments, till death do you part. But in a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome, you'll fall in love with it, forgive it, pray for it to never leave you. And one day, maybe one day, it will take you by the hand and guide you to where you ought to be. Maybe. And that is what we call hoping.

Reality Check

Small triumphs, that's all we really live for, isn't it?

Goodbye

And I felt like I lost something today. If I close my eyes and listen closely, I hear the whisper of an echo, of something that used to be so close, but will never be so close again. My body draws in breath like the ocean pulling itself in before a tidal wave; but before it comes crashing down on the shore, my breath comes out as a sigh, and I know I'm slightly further away than I was before.

I'm begged to bid goodbye, but I cannot force myself to wave. I weep. I laugh. I weep more. My soul feels like it shrivels in defense, but the truth is that it's enlivened, enhanced by all that it gleaned from a long spell of glee, punctuated by disappointment, though entirely stitched together by love. I mustn't worry, I know; this pain is only temporary. But I cannot help but find that it's a more permanent parting this time.

Between Sleep and Awake

Have you ever thought about sleep? Not the act of sleeping itself, when you're so far gone that not even the apocalypse can wake you, but the moment of falling asleep. Does it scare you that you can't remember it? It terrifies me.

Every night it's the same old thing, a cold bed waiting to be warmed by you, two blankets and a sheet, a fluffed up pillow, and the darkness which settles over you as securely as if it were molded to fit your body. Perhaps for a little while you lay there in the dark, conjuring images of a life you're sure to never live, but slowly, without the slightest acknowledgment in your mind of it, you start to fall asleep. Where, between consciously making up fantasies in your head and dreaming, does your mind stop letting you be aware of the world? One moment you're in a city far away, the next you're as unconscious as the dead.

To willingly be unaware of our surroundings, that is what sleep is. To really not know the beginning sleep and the end of waking, that is the most terrifying feeling of all. That place between sleep and awake, it's the place that will haunt you when you're lying in your bed, thinking about the way you'll soon be in oblivion, without quite knowing how you got there.

Museless

It's a dangerous thing when your muse lets you go. Thoughts slowly grind to a stop, inspiration flutters out the window, without so much as bidding you farewell. Suddenly you're banging your head against the wall because there's a vital part of yourself gone, lost to some place you could not even hope to touch. Emptiness fills your chest to the point of nothing being able to fill it again, nothing but that which is lost. You can't make it come back. All you can do is sit and hope it decides to show up again, bags in hand, with a big smile across its face.

Ice

Memories are built on ice. They slip and slide and puddle, the longer you neglect to revisit them, and soon the details have gone, chaffed away by time; all that's left is a vague idea, an insistence upon filling an otherwise blank space in the timeline of your life. And once it's gone, it's gone, you cannot build it back up again. Memories have no right to leech into the present, no way of building a semblance to something that's happened unless you let them.

But versions of events differ; colours are not always the same, and textures come back as different feelings under fingertips. It's all in the details, and you cannot re-carve them into the present with the precision they had in a past now gone. We are not magnificent, we are not our memories, we are not to reconstruct what already existed, but to forge ahead new paths. What other way is there to measure the depth of ourselves?

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.