Mad girls.
Moonlight-ripened fruit,
Fingertip-censored *****,
Fragile,
Toughened,
Violated.
Throats are burned by whisky,
Eyes blackened and tears shed.
Stars grew between your breast bones once.
Try for me now to care.

Stardust drenched in
Rain and red wine.
Poverty sitting atop rooftops in
Whitewashed cities.
Run;
Around in circles
Until you are too dizzy
To taste his breath.

It is funny;
Funny how one day you can see the universe reflected in your own eyes
And blue-rich galaxies bursting from the hidden darknesses
And the gone-places of your mind.
Your pen is as ceaseless on your paper as your feet are on your bedroom floor.

Other days are like tepid water, or half-sour milk
That is undecided on the matter of its own freshness.
Those dark, gone-places of your mind are not even dimly lit.
And yet you wish for that eye-universe,
And those blue-rich galaxies,
And for your pen to skate across the page
As if possessed by the likes of Ginsberg or Kerouac.

So you wander down to the quiet places;
To the caged city forests where the trees cohabitate with basketball hoops,
And the birds sing their squeezed-in yellow melodies.
To the crumbling, sandy banks,
Where on a good day you can find a smashed white seashell
Or a pocket watch, rusty and decayed with time
And confident in its fragility.

But all you do is stare at the sky.
No miraculous inspiration comes to you;
No stardusted metaphysics,
No juice-rich red and purple existentialism.
No darling lovers dripping with candy-yellow sweetness
As the birds sing like Blake or Wordsworth.

So You return to the loud and cluttered places;
To your places,
To your off-white apartments where the water runs cold
And the refrigerator stinks worse than hell.
To your concrete-welded rivers,
Where the only birds are grey pigeons,
And the most beautiful thing you will find
Is a ***** green bottle
Or a razor blade
With more memories than you.

And you will try tomorrow.
Maybe the ticking of your generic clock
Or the casual griminess of your old green bathtub
Will be enough.
But for now, you will sit,
And you will consider constellations
And contemplate the reason why your lover's eyes
Remind you of the Milky Way.
For now, the eye-universe is still, and the blue-rich galaxies
Are deep in sleep,
Just like you wish you were.

For this is a tepid water day, a half-sour milk day.
And that is not a bad thing, in the end.

I saw dynamic innocence violated by the cold mundane,
Thoughts and plans and dreams dampened down by normality.
They say that naivety, just like defiance,
Is a bloom which should be touched and killed
With all the haste of an eagle in the russet dawn.

I myself am pure and blissful in my confinement.
I do not know the wonders of the sinful world.
But your own bloom was erased long ago,
In a time that you cannot now recall.
Retain your wonder at all costs.
Lest you leave this world as one of their
Success stories.

This room is bright;
Magnolia and whitewash
And economy bulb-light
Illuminate paper and pens and calloused hands.
The idea that this is
Learning
Appears in my mind
With a sudden futility

I sit with my chin cradled in my palm
I do not know, I say.
I do not know what makes the world spin
Or the seasons change.
For none of it matters, in the end.
Seconds spill through the fingers of the universe's greatest thief.
He has stolen lives since the start of everything, they say.
They say that before his birth, there were no lives.
Or deaths, even.

I think of every second that I have lost
To childish existentialism;
Of the seconds lost since the start of this
Stupid
*******
Poem.
They say that I must bite my tongue and listen.
But time,
He bites it for me.

Your life is a lie.
The sweet whisperings of your mother
And the smoky crackle of the fire
Are but illusions;
Illusions of a high and ****** up child.
There is nothing but your own naked mind,
Your own dull eyes.
Nothing but your imperfect body and your raw tongue.
Do not fool yourself;
This is not a dream.

Do not get lost
In your metaphysical ramblings.
Do not allow your stars and galaxies to blind you.
Lovers fall like dynasties and last longer.
Their words and laughter and cheap smoke
Cling to the walls of forgotten tenement houses
Just as your tears and punished blood stain the pages of your notebooks.

I am a writer.
I have seen this poison drowning my mind
Since that first orange dusk.
I am lucky.
I am youthful and wide-eyed in my innocence.
But I watch my seconds bleed
Into the ***** glass beside my bed;
Seconds that lived for writing
Seconds that died for life.

Breathe.

Look around you.

Take it in.

This is transient, fleeting, insignificant.

You can twist, pull, push, warp this reality as much as you want.

But you will never make any of it mean anything.

You like to lie awake at night and stare at your ceiling sometimes.

You like to pretend that you can see through the brick and slate

And paint and plaster

And all the way up to heaven, or to whatever else is up there.

But you can't.

Be wary, kid. This is not your daydream.

This is not the metaphysical realm of your juvenile imagination.

Look to the ground;

To the grass and the earth and the newly fallen leaves,

Look to the sea;

To the waves and the little fishing boats and the screech of the gulls at an orange dawn.

Look to the small things;

To the smell of clean sheets, to the feel of your lover's skin underneath your fingers,

To the sound of the rain as you drift off to sleep and dream of your juvenile metaphysics.

**** it all;

**** your dreams of stars and your visions of constellations.

**** your childish wonderment of the sky at midnight.

**** your existential ramblings and your formless morning murmurings.

**** your futile love, your darling, darling love,

Who looks like the sun and lives like a hurricane.

For this is not your daydream.


- K.L.L.N

Bite your tounge, kid.
Bite it hard and don't be so pathetic.
Yes, I know that you were young once.
I know your mother used to pick you up and kiss your head
And sing you to sleep.

But you're all grown up now.

You don't have the easy excuse of youth anymore.
You can no longer say it's because you're a child.
You're too old, too tired, too worn down.

Sleep is never enough.

Your tears are stupid now.
Tears won't get you anywhere in the Real World, they say.
In the Real World, your mother won't be there to hold your hand.
In the Real World, you're on your own.
But what They don't know
Is that you've been in the Real World all along.
You've known more pain than they think you have.
But obviously, none of that affects you.
Because you're only a kid, and you have it easy.

...Right?

The girl across the room is a stranger.
Her hair is familiar, her face is comfortingly reassuring,
But her eyes speak of trauma,
Of forgotten dreams and aspirations that shatter daily.
In the lines of her tired face I see a dreamer,
And in the pools of her eyes I see a perfect disaster.
Where there was once pure, undiluted hope and happiness,
there is now a dulled pretense.

She feels like a rich, red juice that has been drawn out too far
With tainted water,
Or like a piece of string, pulled taut for so long
that it cannot snap back into its original, unspoiled shape.

In her wearied sigh I hear all of her unspoken truths;
All of the things which she has never said but that need saying anyway.
The girl across the room is my friend.
Her voice is like a song I know all the words to,
Her face is as familiar to me as my own.

In the brightness of her smile I see a warrior,
And in the melody of her laughter I hear my imperfect saviour.
Where there was once desperation and despair,
There is now a golden spark of hope.
In my own tired sigh, I hear a future for the first time;
All of the dreams which I have never followed,
But that need following anyway.
The girl across the room is everything,
And I am nothing.