Concept: White teeth gleam against smiling mouth, laughter drifting like dandelion seeds on the wind. Burnished eyes crinkled and brilliant against the sun. Two hands intertwined and a sky radiant behind them, two hearts alit in weightless chests, red and lustrous.
The light is everywhere.

concept: it is 7:10 in the morning, my room is bathed in gold from the sun’s slow ascension. It is a beautiful life

Concept: There is so much noise around but I am in my own small world and it is blissfully quiet. No one's words can touch me here.

Concept: It is dark out and I can see all of the stars. One by one they fall to Earth, into my room, and light up all the dark parts of myself.

Concept: I am laying in bed in my smog-smothered town but it is okay because the rain hits my face it's pitter patter rhythm lulls me into dreams of rivers and faraway valleys.

Concept: I stop quieting the bird in my heart. She is singing with joy and as she spreads her wings they unfurl from my back. We fly away together. We are both free.

Concept: me, no longer burdened with the notion that I am alone and incapable of understanding. I am surrounded by love. It flows in and out of me.

Concept: people come and go, their presence is a fond memory and their absence is not sharp and raw. We all have our paths.

Concept: I am a hermit crab leaving its shell for the first time. The ocean is vast and I am unafraid.

a concept: the sky is so blue, there is an ocean in the sky. I reach up and my hand comes away wet, there is stardust on my fingers.

a concept: There are eyes looking at me, the colour changes, but not the love. Never the love.

a concept: I can stare at the sun for hours with no pain, the sunlight is leaking into my body. I am glowing golden.

a concept: I cannot see the sky for the trees stretch ever onwards, I can feel the hum of the earth and mother nature blows me kisses in the wind.

a concept: My fingers are clasped around another's hands, they trace circles on my palm. My heart beats and I am finally happy about that.

Concept: I am in the wind and it carries me to undiscovered lands, the air is clean and the trees are tall. I decide to stay.

Everything hurts.
My every syllable is a sin and I cannot confess to the kind stranger in the church because he has never had the devil wage war inside him, God has laid a path for him with roses and gold whilst I trekked through forests and marshes hacking and slashing at every demon that snarled and bared its teeth at me. I left with bleeding wounds from myself, or was it the beasts? it doesn't matter, we are one in the same now.
So you see, that nice priest in this holy house has nothing to say, with all his bread and wine, because my demons whisper louder than he screams, and God and all his angels lay silent and hidden as I succumbed to the devil's velvet tortures. I live in a hell of my own creation and no muse nor divinity can save me now.

Hold on just a moment, dear. There's so much left to confess, and I digress, I do love you, but calm my love, we are naught but pebbles skimming across a surface before our short life and purpose is completed, and we do sink. I have recently seen, or rather, glanced briefly, at the innermost heart of hearts that lingers in every wandering soul, and I saw not comfort there, but black holes, consuming every dazzling star that got too close. So darling, I shall keep far away and remake myself without you and I should hope not to cut myself with your broken pieces. May the ocean carry you to a lost paradise of your own, where you shall both find and fix yourself. But I confess, I digress, my dear, I love you no less.

Everything is so sweetly awful
I am sad for the dead and I am sad
For the living
It is so dark now with the sadness of people
We are the sickest of the breed;
Here you see this sky
This bridge
Empty spaces where people should be
Each mans hell is in a different place,
A circus of cheap and petty emotions
Threatening suicide in Deaths waiting room
Its not a nice world, we are all doomed!
But please have some cheer
There was never meant to be any clarity
The gods play no favourites
And the price of creation
Is never too high

There is a solitary loneliness
to every burning star
and the sky can only ever truly illuminate
when they come together in their solitude
every black hole, every meteorite,
all the discarded planets, and all
of the burning stars
together, in complete unison
with the cosmos, and all it's galaxies
Universes within universes
all working together
the sun and the moons and every lonely comet
turning and clashing in complete order
that is when the night sky
looks brighter than ever
that is when the stars
shine their brightest.

My thoughts are too loud
It is like shouting into empty rooms
And hearing naught but echoes,
Constant and crushing
The heaviness of their hollow sound
Like lead weights that pulse
Until your mind is flooding
And you are drowning.
I am drowning in my thoughts,
These lead weights are anchors
I will sink beneath my silent words
For to speak them means inhaling
Letting their sorrow fill my lungs
They have already taken my mind
They'll not have my breath, too.

I am the sun in all it’s colour
Brightly shining from a seed
Turning slowly with the seasons
For spring where I exceed
I make my way across the earth
Unending in my greed
Yellow petal and smiling stem
But still
Just a ****

It breaks my heart when I hear that you don't think you're beautiful, because darling, you are.  Let me explain... your hair is the colour of caramel and hot tea,  soft as silk and shimmering in the daylight as though it had been injected with the sun itself,  your eyes like the Caribbean Sea,  an alien blue that is more graceful than jewels and more lively than the tide, yet people will still be swept away in their beauty. You've got a smile like an angel that is more infectious than your laughter,  which sounds like bells and joy cascading from lips that are a gateway to every perfect word that escapes your lungs. You're beautiful in your body and how it looks as though it was hand crafted by God himself with all the grace of an artist.  A body that turns heads and hearts, making boys become putty in your hands. You are beautiful and elegant and you need to see that because I assure you, everyone else does.

I come home stumbling drunk
In a haze of morning light
The barest whisper of spring
A soft promise of dawn
I uncradle my heart from my palms
Step neatly out of my dew dappled clothes
Undress and hang up my skin
The freckled mess of it
Remove the pins from my hair
Let it tumble and fall from my scalp
I put firm fingers into a hollow chest
Gently pluck out all my organs
Stack them in labelled boxes
Let the light splinter through my ribs
I smile a slow grin, all teeth and sorrow
Fold myself tenderly onto the floor
Be illuminated as the hours pass
Basking in sunshine and love
Coax the flowers out with songs
Sung through rattling teeth
Swallowed, consumed, wholly hugged
By the growth of green grass
Inside a honey glow room
The wind is a kiss goodbye
The body sleeps
The wind sleeps
I am survived by my softness

I had a dream I was falling
through blue sky and stars
falling, falling, falling,
crash   jolt,   wake up
And find I am still falling
through this bedframe
and the floorboards
down to the molten earth
falling, falling, falling
crash   jolt,   darkness.

Did it hurt when you walked in
and saw your lover
and your friend
in the bed that you had pledged
silent promises to one another in
Did it hurt when your mother called
and told you that something happened
and you need to get home right now
because your sibling isn't okay
Did it hurt when your first pet
took its last breath
and you couldn't cry
because it hadn't hit you yet
that death came so quickly
Did it hurt when you fell from grace
Did you bruise?
Sometimes it hurts enough to make you weep
But I didn't weep
Did you?

I don't have anyone
Not one person gives a ****
Everyone who ever said
That I meant something
Has ****** off or died
I'm not easy to handle
I can be a ***** sometimes
I am not perfect and not easy
To love. But I am so tired
Of feeling upset
And being lonely
I just want someone to be there for me
But
No one
Ever
Is.

I was waiting to become something bigger than myself
something astronomical; imprinted eternally
in the infinite cosmos; i wanted to be a constellation
I wanted to never have to fade out or burn away
not even in your memories.
selfish, yes. egotistical, probably.
and still, i longed to keep you awake at night,
i yearned for astronomers to gaze and ponder
at the marvellous miracle that was myself
narcissism is eating me away; that unquenchable thirst
to live unending in the spaces between breaths
but in the end, my blood isn't stardust, or fire
when i fall away to bones, to dust, to nothing
it will have simply been red.

I guess you could call it poetic how by the age of 12 I had no recollection of what happiness tasted like on my tongue. Some would say it was tragically beautiful.
But it was not poetic, nor was it beautiful,  but it was tragic. It was so very, very sad, and that sadness is only doubled now that people see sorrow as glorious.  It is not glorious. It is not strength. It is a lump of iron in your chest and stomach and it eats you from the inside, out and you have no right to think that blood stained wrists are anything other than tragic. So very,  very tragic.

Like quicksand
I do sink.
I am waiting
For the world
To swallow me
All
Up

I dream about so many
far off places
exotic landscapes,
wild animals,
so many sights to see
never enough time
I want to leave
as soon as I can
get away from this,
the polluting air
and polluting people
I have dreams
so much bigger
than this town.

Under the sun
Past the rivers that run
Over mountains that reach
To the sky
I will find love
On the wings of a dove
And through oceans
And forests
I fly

He's got these eyes, they're so blue oh god its like the ocean and the sky are touching and his smile could melt stone and break hearts but I don't think he'd break mine. And he has these arms that he uses to pull me closer and he holds me when I can't sleep and his lips, jesus, his lips are intoxicating and I get so drunk when he kisses me on my cheek and my mouth and I can't hold him any closer but skin to skin just isn't enough. This all feels like a dream, not I, I can't be this lucky. But here he is, smoking a cigarette and looking at me with those blue, blue eyes if this is a dream don't wake me up.

Let the anchor drop
I will stay rooted to this murky water
until the tide comes in, a forceful fury
and washes me away with the ocean
I will ride the currents to distant lands
and live by the sun and stars,
with the moon as my compass
I will wax and wane with it
ebbing and flowing, in constant creation
like that current that swept me from shore
I will live my adventure, by hell and high water
and I will follow those stars, wherever they lead
But the book must close, the adventure end
and I will return to that anchor and murky water
and live a mediocre life far from ocean's reach
in a mediocre town; country; continent; earth
until my great journey fades, hazy and distant
tucked away under cluttered memory, remaining,
like a dream I once had,
one where I didn't fear the sea.

I don't know how to stop giving myself to people
To stop wanting to pour myself into the empty wells
Of those who do not know how to take their fill of me
I am parched for love and overflowing with it
But the ceaseless torrent of me is torture
And I am leaving both drowning and drought in my wake
The ocean inside of me is fathoms deep with yearning
But the world is a cracked, aching thing
It does not know how to grow anew from salt
I do not know how to dilute that which I spill
The thirsty earth, my thirsty mouth, my gaping, hollow everything
Everything sinks come the flood

I cried an island into the sea
that day you said goodbye
the waves crashed and threw themselves
against the shoreline in a fury
at the audacity of what you did
the water spilled through the streets
and washed away the homes
of all our bitter memories,
they were swept to sea
and drowned amidst the ocean
where i could no longer see them
and i could no longer feel
i cried an island into the sea
because i drowned in a sorrow
that you caused.

I am gazing up through mirrored glass
At dreams and aspirations once abundant in my mind
I watch them as they float overhead
Sorrowful, and mourning at the distance, the barriers
But in this mirrored glass
I see only my own mourning
And the sorrow of my life fragmenting
And slipping away amongst the riptides
Whilst currents pull me under and under
Where I stare at my own failures
I am thousands of fathoms deep
And still sinking

I arrived at the edges of myself
And here, at the end of all things
Admist the darkness and the drowning
Where the souls of my loved ones
Wept for the light they could not see
I leapt into the deep abyss
And surrendered myself to the shadow
That consumes all things
Like a rock into water, I sank
And the cold eclipsing emptiness
Unmade me, and rebirthed me
The weaves of time and space
Spinning me into a creature
That resented the chasm of dark
Yet could not escape it.

Our prayers fall flat and hollow
Shouting into a void that cannot hear us
We are raging at the night, the dead light
Fury, always fury towards finality

Waves that beach us on sand
Then drag us back under riptides
And we scream and swallow salt water
Still screaming while our lungs fill

Fists pounding on glass doors
Always looking into mirrored rooms
We see the destruction, fire tombs,
Apocalyptic visage only you see

Closed doors. And now empty beds
The wasted town sleeping restless
Fitful dreams of Reapers amongst men
The cold loving embrace of Death's gentle caress

Our prayers fall flat and hollow
We may never recover.

Into an empty field she cried it
no witnesses but wheat and wind
hand ****** at her breast
voice cracking and hoarse

"I am more than a dream"

the sky a blush above her
dawn, a distant fond memory
bathed in gold light
her lilting voice, softer now

"I am more than this hope,
this reckless want"

shushed gently by the grass
against her trembling knees
she sinks slowly into the earth
murmers kindly to her own soul

"I'm more than this. I have to be"

The sky no longer rose hued
Breeze whispering through her hair
Night falls, and with it
an ember of the sun flickers out

I can smell you on my clothes
and taste you on my lips
I will never forget the feel
of your hands on my hips
I remember how you smiled
and you looked so filled with light
But i also remember your sadness
that stole fragments from your life
the sadness took you from me
and blackened your beautiful heart
It was stronger than my voice
Calling out to you from the dark
the sadness finally ended
but so did your gasps for breath
I will love you better now
but it does not reverse your death.

I think the worst of it
Is that you.. forget
Who you were before
Memories slip away
And feelings
Until you're left with this
Vague sense, this innate
Understanding
That you used to be more
You used to be something
With more substance
Than this *ghost

Mold yourself like clay to suit those you want to adore you, lose yourself in the pitch dark of their requirements and forget sense of self in the pursuit of acceptance. Reach wildly and blindly for their praise and call it love, love, love.

We're just a bunch of stupid kids. We pretend to know about love in the hopes that it will fill the gaping hole in our chests caused by the lead bullets of our parent's words or our friend's mockery. In truth we try to be mature and 'grown up' but we're not.  We're just 9 year olds stuck in a 15 year old body, trying to create a jigsaw but we've got missing pieces where our dreams should be and Reality has either hidden or destroyed all our aspirations that were so important when we were little. Now we're struggling through GCSE's and getting by solely on coffee to hide the lack of sleep, expected to decide our future when most of us can't even decide what to have for breakfast in the morning. I guess what I'm trying to say is...
We're just children.

Storm clouds above my head
lords know i've been here
a thousand different times
trying to piece together
fragments of a bitter life
and a bitter past
that doesn't quite make sense to me
I can hear the rain and it falls hard
but dawn will come soon
and perhaps i will be made anew
and live the remainder of my days
content and happy
but perhaps i will fade to nothing
and live in the lands of eternal youth
and eternal beauty
the sun's coming up
the rain has stopped.