The whisper of autumn
Creeps beneath an open window,
Contrasting heavily to the warmth
Of a secluded soul taught
By willow tree fingers
Scraping against the mirror
Of a lake frozen over
And memories accidentally mixed
With too much desire
And not enough output
That the cold should not be feared,
For perhaps sometimes
The most distasteful sensations
Are the ones that remind us
That we are still breathing them in,
Alive and well enough
To reside in our own skin.

Unsettling thoughts
Raise and swim much like
Misappropriated sand with
An anchor running through it
That never quite catches,
Despite the various mounds
Of sand and rock
Chiseled into the Earth
Using all its good form
And time that couldn't have been
Wasted anywhere better.

The way she sat
Perfectly poised
Against the breeze
Of the world
And the tears of it
Melted my mind
And  made the hairs stand up
All over my arms.

While she may not be perfect,
She glows in all her attempts.

She had a glow
That illuminated the
Shadow of the sun
That was put out with
A misplaced scalpel
Across her beating neck,
And the gas that
Put her to sleep
Held her down,
Hugged her tight
As she choked,
And woke up
In a place so dark.

The girl whose hair
Hung strung from
The crooked inner workings
Of her geared mind
Dusty, rusted, and unkempt
Against her most eager desires,
Bathed in the waves
Of the oblivion that surrounds us
During this night she absorbed
Into the fibers that nestle
Into the strings of her shirt,
Singing against the gentle flow
Of an evening breeze
Much cooler than that
Of one plagued by the day's sun,
And while the fire
Has been extinguished
And its flames dancing in licks
Have laid to sleep,
The moon has kissed her,
And she portrays the wisdom
She locks away behind a steel box,
Chained and covered with padlocks,
A glow never dim seeping
From beneath the lid.

The truth is, I’m not really sure who I am.  She told us to draw ourselves and then to draw our souls; so I drew my face scratched and uneven, just as I’ve always seen it, and frowned at the result both in the mirror and on the paper.  The only soul I’ve ever really known was the one that shone through the strokes of the keys I punched, the scrawling of ink on paper in mismatched arrays of awkward thoughts, disorientated and unorganized, shaded different spews of emotion and rearranged through the lens of ever last viewer’s eye.  Even so, this soul that is composed of words that defined me painted a picture vivid in its contrast, though blurry from both afar and close enough to squint, no details able to be made out.  These words that have wrapped around my soul rubbed raw from the time my skin first flinched at the cool March air cannot be deciphered by their author, though I know somehow that their letters flowing into one another say more than any curve of my face ever could.  These words are black and white, two extremes crafted in the pallet of the Universe’s toolshed, and perhaps that’s exactly what I am.  Black or white.  I’m dark and lost and scrounging for some rusting wall or tree branch to cling to as to ensure the shimmering waves, onyx and charcoal in their nature with the flow of blood in its spine, do not flood into my mouth at a rate in which is too quick to balance myself upon them, or, I’m white, drifting snow from a cloud scraping the vast expanse of brilliant blue gazing as a sky above all the world, pure, innocent, unscathed with the potential for creation in vibrancies yet unknown, or to be ripped to bits, scattered amongst piles of cream and autumn leaves drained of their color beneath months of shivering frost.  And so, perhaps any physical representation of my being would be all wrong, because that’s not what I am.  Myself, my soul, it resides in the murky depths of heights I’ve yet to discover, tethered endlessly and uncertain among the caverns of my inners, pink and mushy, stirred and ******, untouched from the harsh light of a world encased in brevity.

She is a black spot
Much like ink on a white
Sofa, a mark of insanity,
A truth that smears

More and more at every glance.