Sit
and place your hands somewhere you cannot reach.
Breathe
just like each day you've lived and breathed before.
Feel
the tension building up within your spine.
Try
to fill your shaking hands with something new.
Fail
to keep your brittle, breaking will in check.
Run
your fingers through the graveyard on your head.
Fight
the urge that wants to pull you to the edge.
Lose
yourself in treacle truths and bitter tastes.
One.
You find that bare and balding patch of skin.
Ten.
Each pluck removes a tiny piece of sin.
Thirty.
The pain reminds your mind that you're alive.
Forty.
The shame reminds your heart you want to die.
Fifty.
Demonic hungers spur your fingers more.
Sixty.
And hair by hair you carpet wooden floors.
Eighty.
You picture faces of the ones you love.
Ninety.
Your innocence lives like a dying dove.
Hairs
in hundreds lie around your pillowcase,
around, not on, your sore and bleeding scalp.
Each time you vow to never pick again,
but Trich plays tricks and makes you take his help.

Each hair I pluck from my head feels good; well satisfying at the time.
Until I look at it in my fingers.
I can see where my natural hair color ends and where the blonde begins.
I run it over my fingertips and then drop it off to my side.
Time to find another.
And another.
Until I realize in a panic that I have just pulled out even more of what was left of my bangs.
Perfect.
Let's see if I can figure out how to cover this up, or maybe this time I can't.
What then?

we are the wild youth.

with lungs full of ocean water and ribs stained red with sunsets and roses

we have lilacs and honey dripping from our frozen fingertips

with watermelon smiles and candle wax eyes, we pull at our star dusted skin

and howl to the moon.

and with heads full of midnight and our veins swimming in twilight,

we dream our big dreams and pull down the stars, begging for our wishes to

come true