The dreamers are here again, they say
They see our eyes drawn open, they see us blinking in the sunlight,
Taking tentative steps towards each other, away from the walls and into the fields
Where off come our shoes, and we run, barefoot,
Into water splashed with sunlight, and through the sky the great golden orb arches,
Spinning summer into the north.

I know what they're thinking. They think we've stopped dreaming.
Because we open our eyes and laugh with them,
Because we're consciously reacting to this reality,
They think it's the only one that matters.

They think that somehow, being awake means we're not asleep.

You'd have to be one of us to understand how many worlds you can coexist in at once, without losing sight of ourselves.

It only took a couple cuts, a couple hits in the right places,
A few diseases filling the right spaces
To end his life.

It only took a thousand years, a hundred love letters,
An entire movement born
To describe it.

It only took the first glance of beauty, first flash of light,
First footsteps forward
To convince them to tears.

All dressed in black, there they stood,
The formal entourage for the dead,
As in their eyes the rain-beat mud
Wrote with explosions what no human will read.

In a city where it's all about control
The students and the teachers are the oppressed today
This entire school is just a straitjacket
Waiting to reach its fingers of conformity up and around our throats,
Waiting to twist all the differences out of us,
Waiting to write a curriculum, a test that can be taken,
One to measure our minds, our thoughts, our hearts

Don't those ******* know
It's not their job to compare us?
And besides, you can't gauge emotion
Or tell me that my heart is below average
You can't say to me that I'm not thinking properly.

*******, there's no "right thought" I can have.
It's not a matter of how much I love or who.
You can't look at me once and say you know my soul.
But you would love that, wouldn't you? You'd love
To label everything, and neatly shelve it away,
In some great and empty vault, where you'll only constrain its potential.
By writing such a test you would be condemning all of us to eternal emptiness.

at 1 am between the last curling step of the escalator
and the corner of the wall
a girl sat sipping tea
feeling perfectly at peace
you could see it in her face
in her knees on the frozen concrete
in her fingers gripping red and swollen
even as the wind wound itself around her body
slipping through the cracks in her stained uniform
you knew that she felt at once
alone and at one with the world

I wish I could fix you,
Take all those broken pieces in your head
And glue them together again.
Then maybe you’d see yourself as the person you are
Rather than the one you wish you were.

I wish I could fix you,
Take all those little things about yourself
That you hate and let you love them.
Then maybe you’d learn to be the person you are
Rather than act like the one you wish you were.

I wish I could fix you,
Mend you; make you into someone who believes
In life and love again.
But I can’t. I don’t know who you are
And I don’t know who you wish you were;
All I know is there’s a stranger on the bus
With silver tears falling down, down, down
Trying to hide the emptiness in her eyes.

I wish I could fix you.

imagine,            just imagine;       it says,
                                                                   it calls, it cries
against               the                             magnificent                                                                         vacuous
                          everything                 it echoes and                 whispers
            with the                  voices of                          the mind.
but no one                       strains to listen,
                not one                        thought             in its head                                                            will unwind.

                                                                         we                cannot      convince ourselves of life
beyond what we see,  we do not think
in                          concepts                                    of                                               infinity.

and here we find                 the             error       in       the        humane-
  here lies our great struggle,                                   here our great pain-
                                  we don't want to let go of what makes us unique,
                                                          don't want to     l   o    s     e       ourselves to the concrete
   the cities will rise up and the nations will
                                                                             f
                                                                                a
                                                                                    l
                                                                                        l,
                                                                                                  
                                                                                            but we can't find the method in the madness of it all.