You're willing to die for a country
That will exclude you from being able to serve.
You're willing to **** for a country
That still thinks a Bible is a valid argument.
You're willing to contribute to a conflict
That isn't as big a threat to your life
As the people you've vowed to protect the liberty of.
And you do it again and again
With a fraction of the respect patriots demand veterans are entitled to.
Because you've decided to put the needs of the complacent
Above your own human rights.
And you'll get no thanks from them,
Because they can't sleep easily at night
Unless they can rip off your clothing and see what's in your pants.
And if it doesn't add up to their image?
You can sacrifice your life for theirs and they'll still call you a freak.

I'm the monster clawing at the walls.
You gave me the taste for your blood and then locked me in here.
Your scent stains every surface in the room;
Tantalising but with no flesh to sink my fangs into.
Rabid dog-type wildness becomes me,
Transforms me into a thing driven by madness and instinct.
You are the prey with footprints but no body.
I am the predator never knowing satiety.
Pacing replaces hunting, I'm starving,
And your constant, elusive presence has me frenzied.
Viscera begin to litter the room.
Yours or mine? I don't know. I'm starving.

Pain.
It's tempting.
Hidden in hearts
That hold onto memories.
Addiction.

Healing.
It's reluctant.
The mind fails
But it always continues.
Affliction.

I want to be one of those cool, modern Vikings,
But I'm too short, beardless and fat.
I guess I'd make a good Hobbit,
But it's not really the same thing.
Anyway, sometimes things are just unreachable.

Stars sprinkle the inky night sky
Like crumbs of diamonds on a still, midnight ocean.
I am not afraid to be here, alone,
In the vastness of twilight.
For these few moments, time is as long
As the space between those stars,
And as empty, too.
The uncertainty that sunrise will follow.
As sure as the sun is destined to rise everyday,
When there's only darkness surrounding you,
Pierced slightly by the silvery glow of moonlight...
You're all alone and helpless.
You only have the vague hope that the sun will return.
And as I sit here now, star-gazer,
Faceless nomad on the damp grass;
I feel immortal, and I am afraid
That I will always be alone with the stars.

Flowers on headstones.
Vivid colours amongst grey
To brighten the grief.

When I started getting sick,
My school attendance dropped week by week.
It was a painfully slow process;
A day here and there turned into a few days,
Turned into a week, until I spent weeks off school.
My friends dropped even slower, even more painfully.
The ones I'd made at that school disappeared
Like the world's greatest magician collective.
And the ones who I'd known for years...
Well, they were too busy living their own lives.
They saw me here and there, and it made me happy when they did,
In the same way that rare glimpses of gold make a poor man smile.
But eventually the darkness of loneliness devoured me entirely,
And I receded away from everyone while blaming them.
In those days, I was a zombie in all aspects of life,
And the Internet was the only time I had a reprieve.
I was a hollow shell, grunting one-word answers to parents,
While discussing my favourite shows with online friends.
And without that online presence, I know I'd have ended it
With the shadowy hand of depression passing me the knife.
I never would've made it this far,
Where eight years have passed and I'm still close to those friends,
Where I've met up with some of them
And overcome my anxiety in ways I never thought possible.
To many, the Internet is for shallow, brainless people,
But for many, it's a lifeline, and every #selfie smile I see
Is a person thriving instead of wilting.

He watches; quiet, reflective.
No doubt he detected
The weight of my
Body-shaped shame.
My name similar to his,
Who now rots under sunlight,
Unabashed in his righteousness
To which I was blind.
I find myself here,
In a garden once perfect,
Now tainted with ******.
I heard the scratching,
Faint at first,
So I turned and saw him.
The raven watches;
Quiet, perceptive,
His gaze so effective.
His foot scratches the ground,
Making a sound that feels
Almost peaceful.
He unearths the freedom
That I need him to show me.
Just below me,
The earth is opening up.
I grab my brother's limp arm,
Drag him away
From the evidence of his harm.
Further away
From the judgment of God.
The raven approves;
He quietly nods.

It's hard to describe just how conflicting it is;
To hate more than half of yourself.
How, as much as I hate my entirety with such ferocity,
There's also a palpable hatred towards an actual presence.
And it's hard not to think of myself as jigsaw pieces,
Not carefully pieced together, but instead forcefully jammed
Into wherever impatience let them fit,
Leaving me with gaps, disconnect and feeling mutilated.
It's getting less and less vague as the days go on,
And sometimes that's a good thing.
It feels good to know what parts of yourself you want to burn,
And what parts your disgust decides to leave alone.
But sometimes it hurts to hate things that are so specific.
To hate things that are firmly attached to me, that I can't just tear off.
How can I love myself when I can't throw pieces away,
But my brain is telling me that those pieces stuck to me so permanently,
Are actually...lethal?

There are times when I'm overcome by this feeling,
That I want to die before I turn 30.
I don't know why I've become so fixated by the number,
Maybe because it's just over five years away,
And five years flies by in an instant
Without me making any progress with getting better.
My life stopped existing at 16,
So I still have this childish, biased view of age,
Where anything anywhere close to the halfway point
Of the average life expectancy feels 'old'.
I'm just so afraid of blinking and realising
I've missed out on my only chance of youthful enjoyment.
And there are people in their 30s who climb Everest,
Who jump out of planes for fun and who travel the world,
So I know it's stupid.
But it feels like five years from now
I'll be wrinkled, with cracking bones and a stomach
Too weak to swallow adventure.

I love the idea of healing,
But I'm not just suffering from symptoms,
I am the sickness,
Punching myself black and blue,
Refusing to stop until I'm soaking red.
I'm better off suffering from the thing that kills me,
Than cutting away parts of me until useless fragments remain.
Like the captain that goes down with his ship,
I will never see salvation from this point onward.
This disease has seeped into my cells
And now I'm more sickness than human.
If I took away the biggest part of me,
What would I be left with, but emptiness?

Cold, lonely shower.
Watching the skies turn dark grey.
Soft piano notes.

Perspiration coats skin
That stays invisible in the black of the night.
Rain hums an erratic but steady melody,
Leaving rhythm-keeping to the bodies;
Burnt with lust that consumed them
Quicker than rain can douse spirits,
Knowing they downed spirits in a whirl of confusion.
Throats burned, and tongues searched for answers
To questions she didn't recall asking.
Retracing memories' footsteps back...
Back to the bar where his charm set a flame that,
Ironically, made her wetter than the rain-soaked coat
That he took from her, whilst offering his own.
She remembers now.
Walking, talking, thinking away the rain,
Until his soft lips were upon hers and she resisted nothing.
Pushing, pulling, each other into a niche
That will hide their encounter from the wrong kinds of eyes.
A moment after the darkness swallows them whole
Does the predator devour its prey.
It is a prowler, always stalking the scent of pheromones,
Always leaving behind ruins.

Dropped off in a desert.
Combat uniform tight against me.
Sweat gripping my skin in a desperate plea
For sanity to return, so I may escape.
Gunfire stutters its loud whispers of death against my eardrums.
Explosions drown out screams. My own?
I blink. The dust engulfs my body as I writhe on the ground;
Fetal position my permanent placement.
Longing for the ground to swallow me whole,
To the comfort of death's womb.
Cries of, "Get the hell up! What are you? This is a man's war!"
I get up.
The gun at my side like an old man's artificial hip;
Comfort and support in an unstable land.
I look at the chaos and depravity around me.
This is supposed to be Heaven to me,
Yet the combat boots feel too heavy.

I don't look like me, I don't sound like me,
I don't feel like me.
Sometimes it feels not like I'm in the present,
But like I'm from the future sent back too far into the past,
And I'm impatiently waiting, playing catch up
Until my body grows into its brain.
Please, god, let me grow into myself.
My skin feels stretched too tightly over brittle bones,
And my muscles are so itchy,
I want to rip away my flesh just to reach inside.
My heart clamours incessantly, hurling itself at my rib cage
With such ferocity that my entire chest shakes with its beating.
Please, god, let something quieten it,
And if it can't appease it, please, god, let something silence it for good.

They want us marching to the sound of fear,
Footsteps dull, thudding in-time with one another,
Eyes always fixed on the horizon,
Searching for a sun that always lies just too below to see.
We cannot go back;
Nighttime has already fallen
And we march ever forward, chasing sunlight or outrunning darkness.
We are never sure which.
The stars are no longer the pinpricks that show us a glimpse of Heaven
Poking through the blanket of vast, lonely nothingness.
They have mutated into the eyes of our enemies,
And they surround us and outnumber us a million to one.
They want us to move forward, but no matter how far we march,
We are followed by more and more eyes, twinkling and menacing.
Black silhouettes of trees stand against indigo skies,
Swaying so erratically in the wind that we swear they're chasing us.
March faster than the trees, faster than the stars' light can travel.
March faster than the sound of the war drums can reach our panicking ears.
They are here. I can hear the drums.
Can you hear the sound of drums?

Sometimes (most of the time),
The title takes more effort than the poem.
If you're inspired, your pen moves your wrist
Faster, almost, than the brain can think of sentences.
And even when you're not inspired, when you've got writer's block,
You manage to think of a topic and away your talented self goes.
Then there's the title.
Do you want it to be simple or eye-catching
To the point of forcing people's eyes to read more?
Will you use a line from the poem,
Perhaps a word that sums up the general mood?
Or are you like me?
Do you want to think up a word combination
That probably doesn't exist anywhere except your poem?
Are you urging your brain like whipping an already-galloping horse
To think up a word far beyond your vocabulary skills?
I can write a poem in ten minutes,
And spend a week waiting for the perfect title.
Sometimes it never comes, but when it does,
I often love the titles more than its content.

It's like having phantom limbs,
All protruding from random points on your body.
Sometimes it's like having limbs where there should be nothing,
And your brain is telling you that your hand must've taken a wrong turn.
I want to touch parts of me that don't exist
Outside of the empty vacuum of dreams.
I want to drag the scalpel across my own skin
And rip out the heavy weight of the tissue that drags me down.
Most of the time it's something I fixate on multiple times throughout the day.
Sometimes the worst-case scenario takes hold,
And on those days I've got a serrated knife in my hand,
I'm trying to find a reason to put it down.
I almost always put it down, if only out of vanity.
If only for the return of sanity.
So I breathe, I try to gain more air than is possible
Because the heaviest weight tends to be lying on my chest.
I breathe enough to return to passive fixation,
Where it's like an obsession and I'm stalking my own downfall.
I just want to touch the parts of me that don't exist.
I want to feel that they exist.
I need to know that I exist.

I've needed glasses since I was 11 years old,
And I never wore them until a few weeks ago.
I was afraid of being bullied,
So I spent my entire school years with blurred vision,
Sitting close to the whiteboards,
Or sneakily copying the words from my friends' notebooks.
And now I have glasses and the world is clear and pristine.
Or it would be if they weren't constantly smudged and *****.
No matter how clean I get them,
Three minutes later they've attracted more smudges, clumsy fingerprints.
My point is, helping yourself is the right thing to do,
But it doesn't always mean the quality of your life will be better.
Just...different.

It hits out of nowhere, with no warning.
A year since my last mental breakdown,
Thinking I was done with suicidal ideation,
And it hits me with the force of a torpedo.
I never know where it was lying dormant
Or what triggered the volcanic eruption
That burns away all progress made.
I just know that it hurts, and the ash lays heavy on me.
I lie down and I don't let myself get up.

I've discovered Hell, and the truth is,
It isn't a place you go, it's a sickness.
It resides within your bones
And its scaffolding is made from trauma.
The only fire you'll find is from the white-hot flashbacks
That leave you drenched in sweat that smells like smoke.
No-one lives there except you and your enemies,
And your enemies are fragments of history, unable to be killed.
Your mind is the devil that subjects you to punishment
That you can't help but be convinced that you deserve,
And escape is a notion kept only for tears;
Everything else remains trapped.
Hell is being held within the cage of your own body
And killing yourself trying to break free.

I'm afraid of dying alone.
I'm afraid of how I'm always the one
Who reaches out to loved ones first.
Like they're more comfortable apart from me
Than I am from them.
And it becomes a chore, a conscious decision
To not obsess over how long it's been since we've spoken,
And if it means they don't like me or they're just busy.
I'm terrified of everything shortening my life span
Or the quality of the time I have left.
How severely I'm impacted by my own wilting body
And how many goals it means will be left unticked.
Sometimes when it's night, and the world is covered in silence,
I wish to myself that I'd never existed.
Such a waste to be given life and to spend it all
On illness, misery and loneliness.
I'm scared of dying alone,
But I'm more scared of living alone.
And I am living alone.

There's a sea I sometimes find myself treading in,
Sometimes steady, sometimes drowning.
It's hard to stay afloat at times,
And I hallucinate people on ships sailing past me,
Not a care in the world, and I hate them;
Every imagined smile hurts like inhaling the saltwater.
But the worst thing is the monstrous shadow beneath the waves,
Huge and treacherous with eyes like emeralds,
It wants to swallow me whole and drag me down,
Into waters so deep that all becomes black.
And worst of all, when I hear that leviathan's rumbling roar,
I sometimes think it's coming from inside me.

Desire. It's the storm cloud that creeps
Across the skull and blocks the light of common sense.
It's the janitor with a hidden agenda
That doesn't allow any light bulb to come on.
A Svengali swinging a pendulum left to right,
Until the mind is at its complete beck and call.

Desire. It reaps millions of butterflies;
Grown in the stomach. Wanting to be free.
It's the cause of the tension in your body.
The tsunami in your eyes. The quaking of the hands.
Most importantly, it's the internal burning sensation
That spreads to become a hole in the heart.

Desire. It's the delicate crumbling of anxiety
That melts with the comforting warmth of relief.
The fire of temptation; burning so sweet
As sweat collects upon victims unknown.
The aching in the muscles, the knocking in the chest
Of a heart whose cavity has been patched up.

Desire. It's the patch that frays over time
And the hole is re-opened. Tears re-flood.
The trembling vocal chords and the cracking voice
That fall like foundations under searing heat.
The eventual destruction and its finality
That hit you with a dull metallic taste in the mouth.

Finally knowing that no matter how bad you want it,
You will never own it unless under its own terms.
Advice? Read the fine print.

Love is like water.
It has no colour, no smell, no taste.
It is neutral in everything.
There is no joy in love, nor any sorrow.
The only thing we gain from love itself
Is the relief, like drinking a cool glass of water
On a hot, relentless day, or for some,
A desperate need for quenching the thirst
Of one who was dying of dehydration.
Besides that, all else is down to the person you love;
What you love about them is what turns the water blue, red,
Or the colour of galaxies.

You're a wolf in sheep's clothing
That I saw break itself apart just so it could join the flock.
You lived with the sheep long enough that your stench faded,
Inhaled their lifestyle until it became yours.
Then the real wolves came, wearing their own skin,
Entered the flock and began to feast upon the sheep.
You sat, injured and deformed, wearing fluffy, white wool
Over your grey fur.
They came for you, and you pounced.
Your self-blunted teeth split their skulls open,
And your claws tore flesh like the sheep tore blades of grass.
They came for you, but now they are yours.
You ate the wolves' flesh and licked clean their blood;
Your sheep's clothing stained red with wolf.

How do you carry a child's coffin
When not long ago, you cradled them in your arms?
How do you wrap a child in burial cloth
When just a few years ago, you were still dressing them?
Where there was laughter and learning,
There came screaming and ******.
No smell of school dinners wafting through corridors,
Only burning and gunfire and blood.
Dread and panic replaced exam nerves,
And mourning has destroyed post-test celebrations.
What have we become, to turn a school into an execution site
Under the facade of a warzone?
To drag children out from seats, stare innocence in the face
And send them lifeless to the ground with a single bullet?
There is no cause great enough to **** children,
Nor any punishment severe enough to atone.
Families have been ripped to fragments,
And friendships have been severed or laid to rest together.
Hallways are silent with the heaviness of death,
But the living are still crying and screaming with grief.
We mourn for the dead and we weep for the living,
And as always, we plead, beg, hope for better days to come.
How do you carry your child's coffin
Knowing it's the last time you'll carry them to bed?
How do you wrap your child in burial cloth
Knowing it's the last time you'll ever see their face?

You've got the biggest smile on your face but no light in your eyes.
Your ******* are over-exposed, and you're slightly less than flesh but much more than bone.
Nobody remembers you now except in black and white,
In headlines and articles; your existence summed up in a single sobriquet.
You're the Mona Lisa of tragedy, a painting created with camera flashes,
And your nakedness is clothed in speculation and mystery.
The scandal of an era; defamation and declarations of promiscuity,
Ripping away your personality, tearing off your integrity.
Left even less than the mess your artist carved you into
After the insatiable appetites of the vultures picked your image dry.
A mere carcass where once there was a body of hopes and dreams,
Posed to perfection; you're the model everyone imagines you to be.
Beauty personified, everyone is an admirer,
Everyone wants to take credit for creating a masterpiece,
Yet there is only one person that can take credit.
Only one person responsible for transforming you
From the ordinary beauty to the extraordinary artwork.
You were transcended into eternity.
Only your artist and his methods remain secret;
A sculptor, a painter with an eye for an eye-catcher.
You're the flower that was destined for fame,
Even if your petals had to be cut up first.

They raised me to be who I am,
And I could never have been any different.
They spent countless hours nurturing me and cherishing
Every achievement throughout my life.
I loved them so much, and I'd have done anything for them,
Will still do anything for them, because I knew they loved me back.
Until they pushed me away from them,
Sent me falling through the sky and got the hell away from me
As though I was nothing to them anymore,
Never had been their little boy.

And I fall through clouds like they don't want to be near me,
And I fall until the details below me come into focus.
I cry when I see the city, the buildings, the people.
I cry because I know now why I was created.
They come closer to me as I move closer to them,
And I can feel my insides start to churn,
And then it burns before I've even reached the ground.
I'm blinded by the brightness of my own incineration,
And with my last thoughts I beg everyone below me,
Though they can't hear me under the roar of death,
"Please don't look at the light."

I'm locked in a cage.
Half my body spilling out through the bars;
Arms bent, snapped bones piercing through skin,
Stretched out, reaching for the key that gets further away.
Other half still held captive, hidden in the darkness
Of the secret that never wants to be paroled.
I want to escape, but the jagged limbs have formed a knot
And I can neither be pulled out through the gaps of the bars,
Nor back into the depths of repression.
I'm half free and half trapped,
And those two states of being cancel each other out.
I am nothing.

I didn't go to your funeral today.
Wasn't well enough.
Part of me feels guilty, but not because of you,
Just because there's an expectation to go to funerals.
Really, I don't mind though.
I don't mind not thinking 'goodbye' in the direction of a coffin
While a man talks about things I don't believe in.
You and I said goodbye not long ago,
And it's a memory I'll forever cherish.
How fragile you were, yet how strong you became
Under the weight of your mother's death.
How you took my own grieving mother under your arm,
Outstretched in love, and asked her if she'll be OK.
And then you turned and looked at me, called me by name,
Walked over to me and asked how I was.
Said goodbye and gave me a hug.
How much your old personality shone through in that moment,
After years of mental health problems but you were still my auntie Jackie.
I didn't go to your funeral today,
But I've got the best memory of us parting ways.

There's a girl that follows me everywhere.
Sometimes she trails behind me like a shadow,
And sometimes she stands in front of me like a distorted reflection
From a mirror that doesn't speak the present tense.
Words don't exist between us,
She just looks at me with blue eyes bordered by long lashes.
Sometimes I drag her through the looking glass
And tell her she's just like me.
But not as smart.
She looks at the mirror and sees wounds, scars, flaws, ugliness,
Where I see learning, growing, beauty.
Life itself is dancing across her skin
To a beat so fast and erratic that it leaves scorches.
I try to tell her that,
But my words are silenced by her attempts to grow wings.
I applaud this display of determination,
But I sit so far back that she fails before the claps reach her ears.
I sit there and watch her, and it's funny, because I have her wings,
But I can't give them to her, she can only grow them.
So I ask life to snap her DNA in a few places, replace them,
Whisper a few words of wisdom into her brain and hope that those seeds take,
Mutate. Grow into the wings she wants,
The wings that'll let her fly to places
She doesn't even know yet that she wants to go.
Child, girl, adolescent, you'll never be a woman.
You won't live long enough, you'll die bleeding,
Ripping out your ****** while shedding skin.
And you know what? You'll love it.

One grave to be opened up.
Two urns to be placed inside.
Three remnants of loved ones to forever rest.

One headstone to be adorned with three inscriptions,
Engraved words on stone as cold as the chills of death;
Names that can't be whispered without feeling the heart ache
With the hollow pit of loss, a black hole of despair.

Two family members following Death in quick succession,
As if they had already decided not to separate from each other.
Yet the comfort those thoughts bring to the living
Fall short, blocked out by the deeply-felt loss.

Three loved ones now eternally together;
Two vulnerable daughters and their ever-loving mother.

I'm that record player that keeps going on,
Playing the same old, outdated song.
I'm sorry.
All my poems spout the same cliches now.
Hell, I'm the embodiment of those cliches now.
I don't know why I'm suffering from the disease
Years after my exposure to patient(s) zero,
But here I am, sick, bed-ridden and sleep-deprived,
Scratching sores I thought had long healed up.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that I don't see colour anymore,
Just the monochromatic shading of decay.
I don't know how to pull myself back up again,
Can't remember how I did it the first time.
I was a ticking time bomb without even realising it,
And I don't even know if I've exploded yet,
Or if this is just the precursor, the countdown
To ripping apart everyone in my vicinity.
I'm sorry.
They say pain makes for the best artists, the best art,
But I'm too repetitive to make anything good.
Even the violent strokes of red have turned dark grey,
And they get darker the further down the abyss I go,
Where the darkness is so dense that light can't penetrate,
And I don't see the nightmares that have come back.
I'm sorry.