The crown on my scalp,

weighs me down...it is a halo of "ocean floor hopelessness".

How many months has it been? Since I've looked at the illistrations, at the poems and the prose upon my floor and smiled in satisfaction? They are all products of misery, of wasted time, why do I try....why do I try when the world will someday end, engulfed in a shroud of golden, god like smoke, what is the point of trying anything, if we shall all be decimated at the last page?

How melancholy and virulent are the thoughts of someone, depressed. These woeful throes of sluggish violence are tiring--showers like forest fires on my skin are the closest thing to a human touch--maybe I'm just lonely. It would make sense after all, how can your roots touch the roots of another tree when you are uprooted every year and relocated. How can you mantain contact wihtout skin, without the touch of a hand on your shoulder...I am the first star in the night sky, and I will be forgotten when the others arrive. Depravity soaks into my skin. It is my lotion, my conditioning of agony--I cry for hours and then feel nothing, for hours, I will lay on the floor, unmoving, as good as dead, a corpse with pale skin, floating meaninglessly in the barren landscape called the "din".

I reach desperatly for the surface of the thousand foot puddle I've cried myself into it. I reach and reach and will my arms to grow long, but the water keeps rising and my breath keeps diving and I don't want to keep living but I've never been a quitter. I build walls when the woman who raised me perished, young. I kept the sun above my head when I was cast into countless, unknown kingdoms called "school", so many, I can't remember the names of half of them. I tried to steady the ocean, when my clan was split, splintered into a thousand shattered jars, all filled with once bright memories, hints of soemthing I shall never have, how jealousy comes to find me, when daughters walk down the street with mothers who have held them since infancy, I miss what I don't know, this mist that collects me collects all of my life's tragedies into one hand and throws a fist into my gut, from my lips pour the tears of unwritten stories and unfinished dreams and ropes that get caught in my throat, because I can no longer sing--there is a defininte chance of dying, of paranoia, but nothing is here in this vacant floor--this dingy carpet beneath my cheek.

I wish this was a dream.