Magic exists all around us.

2. When you laugh your nose crinkles up so perfectly that your freckles dance like little dandelions in the wind. Know that you are special.

3. One day you will find yourself. For now you are allowed to be lost, you are allowed to be confused and you are allowed to be scared. We all are.

4. You have experienced pain and you are still here. I am so proud of you. Do not disregard yourself you beautiful warrior.

5. You have stardust in your veins, you are a living, breathing, walking extraction of the universe. There are galaxies inside your head, moons in your eyes and the ocean in your heart.

6. You are enough.

silent carnivorous savage,
                                          why prey upon our innocent flesh?
streamlining your black venom into fragile veins,
                                          sparse roots multiplying sickness

this lack of color that you provide
drains the blues
                    and reds
                    and yellows,
                  until 4 white hospital walls remain,
and in this bland, neutral palace of death,
                  the beeps of machines
and cries of heartbroken families serve to torture

this, the true fashion of your killing . . .
          no, not the mass piling of amounting dead cells,
but this blood,                                     it's not just blood anymore,
                            crimson liquid melancholy,
traveling into a mind that can only construct horrible images,
                                         groups of mourners surrounding a single grave,
                           wiping Sunday's tears against their pale faces

gnawing away at the slabs of sanity,
                                           concrete and brick,
the image of a young boy with a shovel
                                           far too heavy for him,
using all of his strength to catapult dirt over a casket,
                                           burying his vital innocence,
into the unforgiving soil where it will never be retrieved

how many tears must you taste for your thirst to be quenched?
how many lives must you waste as our friends are entrenched?

why, cancer?

Poetry as a mental illness.
Interesting proposition.

Poets do not see like others.
Poets do not feel like others.
Often, they do not live like others.
Ergo: Poets are not like others.

Assuming others are normal
(assuming that normal exists)
then poets are not normal.

Does that make poetry a mental illness?

I haven't a clue and the mad-hatter
is throwing a party for which
I cannot be late. Forget normal.
Come along. We shall take tea
and play croquet with
flamingoes and hedgehogs,
while speaking in puzzles and rhymes.

That feels normal enough to me.
   ~mce