Step back

Five or six years.

The little girl

On the couch.

She couldn't sleep,

Remember?

It was probably 

4 am,

When she said

"Okay."

Step back 

Five or six months.

The big girl

In the bed.

She was scared, 

Remember?

It was probably

The best thing

When she said

"Okay."

Wake up!

It's 8 o'clock,

And here you are

Without them.

Which one

Would you rather

Be haunted by?

4 am or

Your dreams?

Walk forward,

The choice is clear.

The wiser choice

Is right here.

Walk forward,

Silly girl.

Do the thing

That scares you-

Didn't it work

Before?

through skin

that's a size too large,

that sags on my bones,

i drink a hollow cupful of poison,

your serrated words

drawing blood 

everywhere

i can't hide.

My heart is like a flower. A flower is beautiful and graceful. It blooms even in adversity. It's so majestic that its splendour charms people so much that inspired them to cut it and give it to someone they appreciate or/and love. My heart is like that cut flower you give to someone. I have given my heart and has impacted so many by its marvellous ways. But as a cut flower, the flower it's indeed dying. Dying slowly, slowly... slowly. The most impressive thing is how when the petals dry it's still beautiful. The flower it's completely dead. Rot to the core. The dead flower it's just a small ghost of the beauty it used to be. Yes, my heart is like a dry flower.

She inhaled,

All bright smiles

Gleaming sun.

She exhaled,

She had stars in her eyes,

That had maybe always been there,

Just too bright.

Her hair plays in the wind,

Her hands always searching.

No one takes hold,

Hands come to rest.

Then they start the search again,

Reaching for stained glass,

Other distant broken things.

It cannot save her,

Turns to churning ash,

New cravings come,

Hands start the twitch.

The twitch that's taken so many,

The craving that only grows.

It's dark streets

Her starry eyes wander.

They dart to and fro,

Restless, waiting

For the next fix

To feed the endless.

Her body shakes,

All want,

All need,

Nothing to satisfy.

Money disappears,

Excuses here,

Believed and deceived

By starry eyes.

No paper,

Nor glass,

Nor snow white powder.

Can satisfy her now.

She needs something,

Her hands still search,

She gives herself,

Thinking they'll give something in return.

She scrapes her skin raw,

But cannot wash away

The bitter taste left by her biggest regret.

It's time,

She thinks.

Dark streets still call,

The stained glass

Still tells its seductive story.

The rolled paper,

Still waves its heady smoke,

As if a friend was saying hello.

She's dancing now,

Everything spinning,

Everyone grinning.

Sweat and shine,

People look strange,

But this is normal.

Heart's pounding,

Not because of her,

But because of others.

Her starry eyes

Swallowed by black,

That reflects the sky.

She thinks;

This is the life,

This chaos and slanted view.

Then there's only black,

For her starred eyes,

And universal mind.

In some hazy dream,

The world twists to red and blue,

She knows deep down something's wrong.

When her eyes open next,

It's to disappointment,

Shame just for her.

The next night finds her out again,

Everything still whistling its seductive tune,

Pulling at her,

Smoky hands slip on her paint streaked skin.

Fingers trying to lay trails,

On her barren skin,

She avoids marks of her own.

She feels people reaching,

She's always just slipping,

Dancing between strangers,

Her dance never ending.

The window's left wide,

Warmth leaking out,

She falls in,

Her laugh slowly fading.

Her eyes wide,

Staring at a blanket sky,

Her legs still in the rain.

Head twisting,

Life spinning,

Nothing waits for no man,

But is the only thing that waits for her.

She drags herself away,

Pulls herself to warmth,

Stays the day in bed.

Nothing won't leave her alone,

Alway knocking at her window,

Pulling it open to pull her out,

She could never stand her ground.

Nothing always comes tapping,

Reminding like rain,

Then laying waste,

Dripping down the pane.

Her hand traces words,

On her unfair trial,

As she's witnessed this done before.

One foot in,

One foot out,

They say.

They make her choose;

What's it going to be?

Her hands still searching,

That constant twitch won't leave,

Nothing isn't waiting for her anymore.

She binds herself to the bed,

Nothing just out of reach,

Sweet oblivion singing to her,

Forget what she's done,

Nothing whispers forgiveness.

She waits,

Pulls until she bleeds,

The red coating her wrist,

Where her small act of defiance ties her.

She wants to get clean,

Wash herself of it all,

Including real hands as much as smoky ones.

She bites,

Kicks, claws, screams,

Never escaping.

Nothing trails its fingers,

Beckoning come hither,

She pulls and screams,

Her throat breaking.

Everything is broken,

Except for the rope that binds her,

She refuses to escape.

Her dreams are filled with whispers,

Who tell her about shadowed streets,

Asking her to come home.

It's not home,

She tells herself,

The place where her wrists are bound is home.

After minutes,

Weeks or hours,

Maybe months,

She unties the binds.

Downstairs to her own home,

Where people look up,

Then look away.

She swallows bitterly,

Her voice trying to apologize,

She can't tell them that it was the whispers' fault,

Because it wasn't.

She turns,

Dark streets calling her,

Her hand twitches,

She aches for it,

But nothing has left her alone.

Picking up the shattered pieces,

Her hands bleed over stained glass,

Familiar in her hand.

All eyes are on her,

Breathless with anticipation,

Her own star filled ones come up to meet them,

The bottle goes back on the shelf,

Where she would never touch it again.

She inhaled,

All delicious freedom,

Tainted darkness.

She exhaled,

All bright stars,

That never dim.

One day, I'm going to die. I'm thirteen and I know that I'm going to die. My classmates look at me, and don't understand how I could possibly be so calm about it. 

The truth is, I'm not. I'm scared of what's coming, the inevitable blackness that's on everyone's horizon. I don't know what comes after, whether we even exist after we die. 

All I know is the one day, I'm going to run out of tomorrows and all of my yesterdays won't matter, and every mark I made on history will scar over and fade away, because I was not sharp enough to leave a lasting scar. 

I'll be buried under the weight of time and the skirts of greater people and no one will remember my name. I will vanish into the black air that occupies space, and I will not take up space, simply because I might or might not exist. 

People will tell me that I only get to live once and that might be true, and in the case that it is, WE ONLY GET TO LIVE ONCE. We only get one small generation to exist, to scar the world as much as we can before our own scars fade, taking our tomorrow with it. 

I want to live my once to the fullest, making the most of my small spot in history. I want to be the one to choose when I stop mattering and cease to think and breathe. 

I want to leave my imprint on the world, but my name doesn't matter, and won't ever matter, because history is measured in the bones in the ground and the clouds in the sky. Unless I carve my name in the sun, I will never matter, because when humans don't live anymore, nothing is going to uncover our society and look at my bones and think that I mattered. 

I might leave a small imprint in the human race, but it won't last long. I want to matter, to leave a mark, sure, but the truth is that more often than not, humans leave scars instead of marks, and don't you dare confuse the two. I don't want my name to be a scar, I want it to be a mark that matters - but it won't, because the future will wipe us all out and erase the work of us all. 

Newton won't matter and Shakespeare will be something that no one even knows about and Einstein will cease to matter. 

One day, I'm going to die, and it's not that I don't care or that I hate this life or that I'm not afraid. I'm just moving on, because to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure, and perhaps the next great adventure will offer me a train and I'll board it and go on. 

The land was barren, 

The sky was black. 

Stars hung down,

Too far down. 

They fell from their frail places,

Leaving the sky barren too. 

Now the sky was truly black,

No light to be seen. 

Only burning sands,

Black sky. 

A spark,

Something small. 

A girl,

Her hair whipping in the wind. 

She braves Death Valley,

Where stars died. 

Her walk is lonely,

Without even the moon. 

She is a light,

Where no light should be. 

The last star,

The only feature in this land of waste. 

Only her footsteps,

Left behind. 

Where man once tread,

Leaving wide paths. 

Only she walks now,

Her light held out. 

The only light,

For even the sun has died. 

In the distance,

Another spark. 

He who walks for himself,

She who walks for the world.

More sparks appear,

Now stars are from Earth.

They don’t hang in the heavens anymore,

They are not dead. 

They simply hang low,

Only to climb. 

I was young,

My hands barely mobile,

But my mind running faster than light. 

The thing my parents made me do;

They pushed me down,

To make me see,

The words that hung there,

Unintelligible to me. 

They meant nothing,

Simply something I had to do. 

One day,

Dad comes in,

Sits on my bed,

Pulled out a book,

And began to read. 

The thing is,

My dad does not like books,

He hates them,

In all the ink and paper bound shame. 

But when he read,

I wanted to do it too,

He gave me the many pages,

Of words I shouldn't have understood.

Night after night,

I read,

I pulled forth every word,

Dragging it razor sharp up out of my mind. 

Then the pain wasn't there,

And the murky waters cleared,

Everything came through clear. 

That fateful book,

Still rests on my shelf,

A memento of my passion,

The very seed,

Surround by the deepest roots,

And shelved under the wider branches. 

The clock strikes midnight,

It’s sound reaching down,

For the twisting alleys.

It lands on one wall,

Then kicks off,

Spinning to the next. 

The twelve strikes,

They dance,

Proceeding in their own playful fashion.

They come to tangle in two lover’s feet,

Reminding both of the time,

While the stars gently laugh.

They pull apart, 

Their breath freezing in the night air,

And they part ways,

With nothing but a smile between them,

For that’s all the promise they need. 

Then the sounds move on,

Carried by the wind,

They fly over the curling wafts of smoke,

Dancing through the night mist.

Coming to rest on a window pane,

They peer inside,

Only to see a young woman,

Her belly round with child,

A book in hand,

As she reads to unborn ears. 

Smiling softly to themselves, 

The sounds knock gently on the window,

Reminding the young mother that she must sleep,

That her child will be there in the morning. 

Grinning at a job well done,

The sounds move on, 

To where a family stays up well past the timely hour. 

The sounds barge in through the walls, 

Playing with the young children,

Then smiling after them,

In the fashion of the young parents. 

Tumbling out the door,

The sounds whistle past the barren land scape of a school yard,

Where the children whose smiles they’ve caused,

Will come in the future.

The sounds push each other,

Twirling and shoving,

They race each other out of the city, 

And over the rushing river. 

They stop,

Standing at rest,

To see a young girl,

Her arms wrapped around herself,

With nothing but a small satchel. 

Her face is stained with tears,

Only accented by the slanted moonlight,

Her body trembles,

In cold or anger or grief. 

Her shaking hands clutch at a letter,

As if to keep herself afloat,

In her shattered hope,

And broken promises.

The sounds,

They feel her heart,

And one tentatively steps foreword,

To brush the air against her cheek,

In steadfast support. 

Then they kick up again,

Twirling past the still girl,

Moving to reach the sky. 

The girl, she feels the air,

She reads her letter,

A life boat in a storm. 

Suddenly she stands,

Her chest heaving,

Then she turns and runs,

Her feet striking the ground.

Past the river, 

And down the alleys,

Her hand lighting on lampposts to swing herself around. 

She comes to stop,

Her hand raised to knock,

A gentle tap rings out.

The tap echoes off the brick walls,

Then leaves to follow the path that midnight took.

The small sound cannot travel far, 

Yet it finds a small fire,

Where sparks drift up on the wind,

In the Earth’s imitation of stars.  

I remember walking home bloody

and walking in the front door

to the old man at the table

smoking cigarettes

with my mom

and when he asked me

what my problem was

I told him since we’d

moved there

a week ago

two boys older than me

two grades higher

were chasing and beating me

after school

while I tried to make it

across the field to our house

and every day it’s gotten

worse

until today when

they finally drew blood

my mother hustled to the

kitchen for the bottle of

shitty, burning-orange salve

to make the cuts worse and

while she rubbed it into the gaps of

blood and dirt and small rocks

in my knees and palms and forehead

the old man told me tomorrow on the way

home, I was to take my time across

the field, and when the two of them

stopped me

to punch the biggest one

square in the nose

and not to return home

until I did

and if I didn’t

then to plan on sleeping outside

without supper

or anything else

my mother started going on about

how she was going to call the school

and that I should report the

boys to the principal or vice principal

or to the teacher

but the old man saved me

the trouble of explaining

to her that no matter

how that was played out

I’d be labeled a rat

and I’d have it even worse

and the best way from A

to Z was a straight line

and it was time for me

to start figuring things

out and she started inventing

ways I could reason with the

boys, or how they could talk to

their parents, all the other angles

but he we wasn’t budging

and even after I left the room

they kept it going

I barely slept that night

because I took the old man

seriously

with his long beard

and tattooed fingers

back when no other dad had

such things

and also because I didn’t know

how to throw a punch

or if I could even reach the

bastard’s nose

and I was terrified

but the day was over

and I walked the field home

and the two boys were

there

and the books and folders

and backpack were again

knocked out of my hands

and I was again shoved to the

ground

and my adrenaline was boosted

and I could feel the old man

somehow watching me

and I went ahead and

brought it up

and hit the big one

on the nose

and the blood spat sideways

and he went down instantly

screaming a high pitched wail

while his buddy ran off

and a crowd formed and

I picked up my shit

walked home

where my knuckles

throbbed and my mom

wrapped my hand with

ice crushed in a wet wash rag

and the old man laughed

and nodded at me

and told me

once I took shit once,

I’d take it for the rest

of my life

and from then on

I had no trouble at school

but today this would be

“offensive”

and barbaric

the old man would be in jail

or slapped with some lawsuit

and

I’d be a pariah

and we’d be all over YouTube

today, instead of teaching our children to

truly stand up for themselves

they revert to their natural

forms of confusion

and cut their own flesh or

they blow each other away or

they commit suicide

on the Internet

due to

bullying.