That awkward moment when
You realize your entire life
Your passions
Your opportunities
Your abilities
Are all made possible by the
Blood
Sweat
And Tears
Of people you will never even know
Existed

She was broken
And she acknowledged it.

But what does that mean?
A broken human is surely different
From a broken toy.

You cannot replace the batteries
Or superglue the cracks.

What does it mean to be broken?
It means to be human.
And not quite fixable.

They were broken children
Their scissored minds ran them
In spirals
Until they sat with crossed legs
And crossed lips
To press themselves flatter
They were cut-strings marionettes
Who danced
In an attempt to wring calories
From their balsa-wood bones
Which refused to give
And who pinned their painted smiles
A little tighter each morning
They were snapped-spines picture books
Who’d been warped too far by society
And had had their pages torn from the crease
So that words hung like razor blades
And spliced from each vertebrae

They took them to the circus
Where they were the **** of every joke
But when the clowns speared them with dripping eyes
And artificial mouths that were stretched over grimaces
Like the dust-jackets from different stories
They stared back glassily
Because how can you be afraid
Of the broken clockwork of your reflection?

Although I’ve tried hard to forget I’ll always remember
With all its glaring effervescence my first ever sleepover
With my friend who was afraid of the dark and as she hung the walls of the night
With lamp light that squabbled with Sleep over my No-Mans-Land eyelids.
I wondered how you could fear something that wasn’t even a something
But a lack of something. Now I read the weather forecast
In the horoscope of Orion’s belt I wonder why we were so afraid
Of a world of muted colours. Like Light was an absent parent
That returned sporadically and left an aftertaste with each visit
And blew cigarette smoke in our faces.
Like Light was a worn-out lover too painful to label as X
Around whom we’d begun to orbit and organise our lives.
I stand in the dark we’re all afraid of and wonder if perhaps
The night is not lonely or cruel but simply wants to kiss the stars.

I never said you looked pretty
I never said you looked nice
You never looked good
You never looked beautiful

You looked like art


And art is suppose to make you feel.