Build as you would like to build
With coloured bricks and concrete mortar
Castles and kingdoms
And Mexican sorcerers,
Singing toes and fancy bats,
Or trolls decked with black top hats
Perhaps.

Forget your learned words and bitter truths
Create your own
And enjoy your youth, a bright red apple
On an old fig tree,
Young one you are in all the sense
Fabulously free.

Notice how the world rotates
The shapes and colours and smells and hues
How the Night supports the bone-white moon
How the Sun burns the summer sky blue
How it burns and burns and ebbs
For you

My dear, become
The flower that grew
Petals bright
And a soul
So light
As light as a flying, fluttering kite
You fly and flutter
Into
The darkest night

Though
Sometimes
The night is long
And all the light
Vanishes like an imagined wight
And leaves you
To your fated plight
So you burn and crash
As a fallen kite.

But don't you mind. There are days like this,
Weeks and more
Where nothing will make sense
Perhaps ever at all -

Because life is built on rocky shores
So let the truth be a riddle
You dare to solve.

Should the rain pour and pour
Drowning all your shine
Build a boat, aligned
To your great mind's eye,
And watch
As your sails
Fly in the wind

Because, my love
You were born
To build.

My heart
Is the colour of vermillion
It pumps blood
Red as the dead you have had
Butchered. Life
Is a big red
Puddle you happily jump in
To paint your soul whole
Free from the flag that drapes it.

Perhaps,
You could paint over your hatred
Sell it for parts for tin men hearts
Let it sink in the gutter
Of your imagination.

Yet the morals you have had emblazoned
Singe the lines of demarcation
Of your mind, of this nation
You have joyfully
Settled in.

And until birds, broken
Sing of freedom
And begin to heal
Your mind's abrasion
No peace or calm can live
Inside your soul's pavilion
When the flag of your heart
Burns vermillion.

Round and round, my head is exhausted
and I'm tired of crawling
towards a heroic imagination
suddenly, I fear changing
Autumn has never seemed so strange.
But songs, they keep replaying
the same words and melodies, escapism
is not too far-
though I have to ask, what is it that I'm escaping?
Some days, I forget
the world goes on beyond the shores of my own
head. And the sandcastles are fragile,
easily washed away in a single wave,
until I stand alone.
Without a home, so I wander
most days, I end up in the woods
the chit chatter is constant, here
I can be free. From all the noise,
silence makes for me.

I was following my mind like a map,
a forgotten compass that would give me a sense of
direction. Hoping to be found,
paradoxically, becoming all the more lost
than I had been before. Because I was becoming
a stranger to familiar lands, embracing the heart
of a sailor who departed foreign shores
setting sail
with ambition and strength
all aboard.

Dear Life,

I'd like it, very much please
if you would decide to stick together, and perhaps
pick up the pieces on the floor to join the rest of you
because I don't want to find myself in small
spirals of sadness forever and ever.

Yours sincerely,

a tired and desperate girl.

I whispered solemn secrets the night before it happened,
a deal with fate that I thought was forever sealed.
Much of the strength I could muster was a little more than
Herculean. But tangled webs of thought were being woven in morning's stead
and I couldn't figure out why
my heart was crippling in my chest. So,
hunchbacked with pain I travelled far and long
venturing out of the castle in my mind, that
I learnt to call my home. And with a cape of courage,
I fled into the woods. But little did I know,
it was alive with all the wolves.

I held the world in the palm of my hands,
and it crumbled in the melodic breath
of change.
So the world collapsed,
crickets chirped and tumbleweed rolled on by like
strange passerbys I'd come to be familiar with
these awkward interims filled the voids,
and silence became the only noise
that was comfort to me.
I played each silence like a symphony,
conducting each one; a Beethoven masterpiece
Van Gogh would have cut his right ear off in envy
if he'd seen the way I painted my silences
but none of them were starry nights
just pools of darkness I had learnt to swim in,
until I finally realised,
I was becoming a bit more Sysyphean
when I really wanted to be a bit more
Achillean.
And responsibility dawned on me like the sky on Atlas's shoulders,
and flattened the demons I'd sheltered a while
so with each day,
I began to feel a little bolder, stronger
more like a hoper,
a hero with a new name. I no longer needed to paint forlorn silences
but something sweeter
so I painted a hero. Me.
Artfully.