Stop your regrets
sadness, worry, your presets.
Look up. Reform your mind.
Today is a new time
full of possibility
a festival of fertility
plug in to grace
quicken your pace
to the next frontier
put it in high gear
leave the desert of despair
breathe in the brisk fresh air
arise, emerge and begin
to believe again.

Amen.

Raise a glass and drink up til the bottle is done;
Here's to addictions unconquered
Here's to suicides attached to names not known well enough to grieve for
Here's to the burden one passes onto another when one gets too comfortable
Here's to those who cared when no one else did
Here's to those adolescent walks in the dark chasing shadows
Here's to us speaking til we fell asleep mid sentences
Here's to the lovers who kicked us out the house then kicked us in the head for leaving
Here's to walking in circles with each step painless for the first time in forever & staring out into nothing astounded
Here's to smoking for the first time in months and thinking back to one night years before and the self-inflicted concussions that followed
Here's to the faces we can't look at anymore without our chests caving inward & hating ourselves
Here's to the fascia tissue unzipped & exposed and cringed at & regretted & better left forgotten the next morning
Here's to our sorries telepathically sent & unsent
Here's to forgiveness reached in silence
Here's to time healing nothing but changing everything
Here's to first kisses and final goodbyes
Here's to when she wore his dress for the first time and he her boots
Every vice has it's versa and every versa it's vice, right? right. so
Here's to holding hands with another for another first with heart pounding and surrounding eyes staring or going out of their way not to stare the closer they'd get
Here's to saying **** everyone & everything else when you know beyond a doubt what's right is right
Here's to ugly faces made pretty up-close and seeing pretty faces turn ugly
Here's to spending those last pennies on the first pack of cigarettes in years and looking into foodbanks & catshelters incase nothing got better
Here's to laughing hysterically after getting told you were cheated on, knowing you won't be the paranoid ******* for breaking up again and the hangover-like realisation two days later when the worthlessness settled in
Here's to those lonely walks home covered in blood & punching busstops & ******* in the middle of the street undisturbed by a single soul in-passing
Here's to that hour writhing in a floored mattress screaming the same name over & over again to no answer
Here's to things not working out as planned and it being upto you for that to be for a reason,
Here's to being comatosed & frostbit in pisssoaked jeans as crying family waited for the ambulance to arrive
(surely, I'm not the only one who was supposed to die at thirteen but didn't?)
Here's to the writers who changed how we wrote, the gentle man obsessed with mud turnt muck & thunderstorms & ******* and the pretty French boy and the boundless reclusive femcel before her time
Here's to the men & women we could never become
Here's to love stated but no longer felt, and vice versa and vice versa.

And
Here's to this, the final top up of the night! -too drunk or too tired? either or- and what a night it's been, considering the weight of all those nights before;

Here's to all those loves that never worked out & all those suicidal nights alone trembling with fear of the following day & the next, all leading to you and I sharing this wonderful day together.
Honestly? I wouldn't trade it for the world

in the morning, i will feign ignorance,
pretending to be fast asleep and unaware
as you pull on your shirt and socks

we should have been theater concentrators, like,
if we never talk about it, it just never happened
you're just so nonchalant, and i'm just melodramatic

and i'm never satisfied unless it's something tragically comic
so tonight, let's pretend to be enemies, let's become lovers,
let's drown in shared regrets, get too familiar with each other

after all, tomorrow, when we wake, it'll all be over
your missing friends and my crushing hangover
will, once again, inevitably, reduce us to strangers

i ask you to repent, for me
come clean, for me
and tell your dad,
no, i wasn’t 18

i was
mature for my age

Is there a fundamental truth in following the old and the precedent;
When the only thing that is constant is change?

I walk within the shadows you left behind.
Those twilight places - still and silent -
A lost lover's noman's land.

Scattered there the broken hopes we had.
Our sacred dreams - spent and failed -
My longed for lover's battleground.

Tom Lefort January 2024

History is inherently
full of self-depreciation
studiously staging its ugliness.

It masks the truth of its beauty:

The painful present
birthing breath to the future.

© Qwey.ku 2023