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.

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.

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?

It's hard to be a coward and suicidal,
Afraid of pain and overly-sensitive to guilt simultaneously.
Never wanted to jump from a building,
Because regretting your decision halfway down must be a nightmare.
Must only take a few seconds.
Must feel like longer than you've ever lived.
Didn't want to jump in front of a bus,
Because that seems wildly ineffective.
Didn't want to lie on train tracks;
I know those videos of dismembered people end up
On the darkest places of the Internet,
And I'm nothing if I'm not embarrassed by attention.
Didn't want to hang myself, had enough hospital trips
From asthma attacks rendering me breathless to want to relive it.
Tried to hang myself.
Wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be.
Didn't want to overdose on pills
Because I have an aversion to swallowing them.
Realised the only reason you aren't supposed to chew them
Is so you don't overdose.
Tried to overdose.
Woke up confused and frightened with an apparently not-killer headache.
But that was back then, and this is now.
I don't look at things and see invitations of death anymore.
There's no temptation to analyse them
And see if they're up for the job.
I'm less on the aggressive side of the spectrum,
Swaying, instead, a lot more to being passive.
I don't want to dive in front of traffic,
But I don't always look before I cross the road either.
And I could still end up in the same coffin as if I'd jumped,
But for me, there's a lifetime of difference.

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.

The
Darkness
Descended;
Populations
Eradicated
Instantaneously.

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.

You can't go back, but you can get back to where you were.
Flowers are in full bloom, then come winter they're hiding,
Until the gentle breeze of spring wakes them up again,
Colourful and basking in the sun like they were a year ago.
Life isn't a yo-yo, going back and forth forever;
It's a wheel, continuously turning until the starting point
Becomes the starting point when it reaches a full cycle.
So if you've lost who you were and you know you can't go back,
You don't need to. Eventually you'll come full circle.

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?

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

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

The rain pours and the thunder roars.
It's comforting, it's the sound of solitude
Despite the headlights rolling by
And the lampposts shining brightly orange.
Rain splashes gently, hitting the ground,
And there's no other sound I want to hear,
So I drown everything else out.
In silence and shadow I excel.
Retreating to the alleyway, narrow and foreboding,
Its harrowing nature is a sanctuary for my own self.
I become the darkness that surrounds me,
The nothingness, the non-existent threat.
I hear the sound of heels clicking on pavement,
Gentle splashes where shoe meets water,
Not too far off in the distance,
But it takes me only an instant to let the predator take over my mind.
Steadily paced, the footsteps grow louder;
The pheromones so strong that it's almost a taste.
I wait, breath bated, for the moment to arrive.
The gap between here and slaking the thirst feels too wide,
Like the pupils of my eyes, dilated,
And I'm overdosing on oxytocin when finally I strike.
Pulling the warm body into the claustrophobic alley,
The blackness engulfs us both.
We are nothing.
Nothing exists except for her heartbeat, thumping and drumming
Until it...fades.

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

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.

The further away things are in space when we look at them,
The more we're looking at the past.
So I think you must be at least as old as the universe
To have left such an impact upon it.
Your words as colourful as those pictures of nebulas;
Words of wisdom that hover in the mind long after spoken.
The cold, vacant space you inhale becomes blessed by your existence,
Exhaled into the creation of heat, your breath births countless stars.
Your suffering, a black hole.
Dreadful, heavy beyond measure, eternal.
Would swallow us all into death, split us into pieces,
But you see how far we've come and want us to thrive.
So the black hole swallows up the misery of others,
Growing wider, the hole in your heart, endless.
And then you end, so the universe ends.
There are no more stars to be formed,
Nor galaxies to add to the multitude you gave us.
It's all gone.
It just hasn't reached our eyes yet.

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.

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?

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 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.

Before identities and allegiances are even confirmed,
The cries of anger rise up like a thick, black smoke,
Heavy and suffocating, it flows through streets,
Over the English Channel, across oceans,
Seeping into social media and blanketing all else.
Cries for vengeance,
Vengeance,
Vengeance.
And those cries barely manifested into a wisp
When Beirut was attacked the day before Paris.
I didn't see any Facebook pictures of the flag of Lebanon.
Do any of us even know what the flag of Lebanon looks like???
To **** innocent people is a crime except when we do it,
Then it's "There are always casualties of war,"
But if this isn't a war except when we're killing people,
Can it really be called a war?
We care so much about the injustice of it,
How the innocent are mowed down without mercy,
That we want those bombs dropped and we want them dropped now.
When those bombs destroy homes and blast children's limbs apart,
Bloodless and pale, until the area looks like it used to be a porcelain doll factory...
Will we all have Syrian flags for our Facebook pictures?

It's OK not to be inspired.
You can look at a sunset
Without seeing the colours as smudges of chalk
On the divine, stretched-out canvas of sky.
And you don't have to write everything down,
Because not everything has to be permanent.
Some things only last for as long as you remember them,
And it doesn't make them any less special
Just because they weren't written down or spoken life into.
Existing is art, and creating something
That no-one ever gets to hear is still art.
You're a poet even when you're not rushing to your notebook
Before the words fall through your fingers, slippery with desperation,
Motivation, inspiration for the next poem.
So slow down, because if you forget your masterpiece
Because you were enjoying a careless moment of misplaced inspiration,
Who cares? Even if no-one saw it, you know you created an awesome poem.

Spending a month in a hospital teaches you a lot about people.
The doctor that told me to shave my head or she wouldn't treat me,
The nurses that spent forever chatting to me
And giving me supportive advice about how my illness doesn't define me.
The woman who was given a terminal cancer sentence
And chose not to pay attention to it and defied it anyway.
How she sat next to me on my bed,
Told me that all suffering is valid,
And just because I'm not dying, doesn't mean I don't get to complain.
How she complains more about her skin problems
Than she ever complained about her cancer,
And that's OK, because pain rarely follows rules.
I never even learned her name,
But she gave me the words I hold most closely to me
On those days when I want to fall asleep and never wake up.
I'm allowed to scream and shout and rage against the pain
And the unfairness of it happening to me.
I just have to make sure I know where the line is
Between giving my darkness a voice and pitying myself.

What ghost do I see before me?
You drop to me in
Shackles and chains,
But were you not free?
Can the chains not be broken?
They're deeply rooted
From you to me.
Do these shackles not open?
Why, ghost, do you drag me with you?
I watch you dig up
And unrest earth;
A coffin I'm to climb into?
What fate awaits in here?
You once told me that
Death was free,
So why do you blanket fear?

What ghost do I see before these?
You came to me in
Sorrow and pain,
But were you not in peace?
Can the pain not be spoken?
The roots are deep
Embedded, yes,
But can't the earth be broken?
Why, ghost, can't you take me with you?
I watch you fade
Into memory,
But I want to fade too.
What fate awaits me there?
You once showed me that
Death is free,
So why am I slave to the air?

The thing about spending almost a decade
In social isolation is you forget what's normal.
Imagine my shock when my friend casually pulls me close to her,
A half-hug, friendly embrace.
No context needed, because touches don't always hold
Some deep, meaningful intention.
Yet for the past almost a decade, that's been my reality.
How rare the hugs, how they only ever follow extreme sadness
Or loneliness, the desire for comfort and support.
How I can never reach out to touch someone
Unless I've done it a thousand times before,
And even then, it's an intentional act of love.
Every movement of every muscle is planned in advance,
To minimise the fearful, pounding beats of my heart.
For someone like me, where anxiety floods through all my veins,
I don't know the meaning of the word 'casual'.
And I don't know if I'll ever learn it.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Bed sheets become red sheets,
Pillows becomes tear catchers,
No dream catchers here because only nightmares live,
Feasting on wakeful exhaustion.
Deflated bouncy castles for intestines,
White blood cells searching frantically in enclosed darkness.
Enemy invaders seeping into blood, bone and muscle
As the warriors remain trapped in sticky villi.
Drug dependency is a permanent solution
And overdosing is a consistent caregiver for sleep.
Nausea is a rebellious, suicidal last stand
To go down with the invaders as they're taken out.
A seven year war fought inside your body
With no visible battle lines drawn is lonely.
My skin is pockmarked, riddled with the craters of bombs
Fired from all sides with no mercy for the land.
Sometimes I can't help but wonder what'll **** me first:
The invaders or my body's own troops.

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.

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.