I am more lost than sunshine in a cemetery,
more emotionless than the gravestones.

a few days seem like forever.
soon you look back
and you can’t remember how long ago it was
when you last saw your reflection
make eye contact.

I am trapped in limbo, a paradise
for unknown to live unfettered,
and unfed.

the idea of judgment day is as easy to collect
as a scream in a glass jar.

heaven or hell
light or dark
lost or time
blank or known
loved or invisible
alive or barely living
or just black dead

my footsteps emit echoes,
they bounce off the black horizon and ricochet back to my ears.
i have long since learnt to treat them
with the same disdain i treat
the damp edges of my eyes
my own thoughts have become mockery
against me. i walk down the pier.
floorboards creak below, unable to hold the weight
of both me
and the demons
that cling onto my back.
my shadow is not one of a lone silhouette.
it is of two, me
and my ghost.

i am not sure
which i am.

the dust that line the boardwalks
no longer disturb me.
i have long since clothed myself
in loneliness. though it's warm,
it sinks.
it is only when i feel the rush of another's pulse
the heat off skin,
that my heart starts beating again -
flames engulfing defibrillators,
and i am suspended in a hot air balloon.

there are no winters in my life,
there is only blistering heat
and dampening warmth.
i can't say when all the coldness had seeped out of me,
for i never stopped caring
about myself.
i believe that
i care too much.

now, i find myself drawn
more to the darkness looming
from the lighthouse up ahead, invaded by
shadows after its shimmering fortress
of fireflies and candles
had been burnt down
by its own heat.

the pier reminds me of my thoughts,
discarded and clothed in dust.
leading to nothing but
a shambled shell of a building
burned to ashes by its own light,
crumbling to pieces,
dismembered fragments
lost in the ocean.

And then I thought that
those big, endless dark spaces
between the stars in the night sky
had to mean Something

besides

how much nothing is in
Nothing.

wide-eyed, with daisies in my hair
and my mother’s heels
two sizes too big for me;
with an apron for a shield
and crayons for swords,
I stood at the crossroads.
there, I met the man in velvet black.
he beckoned me over with a gloved finger,
whispered in my ear a promise.
I held his hand,
he wrapped his arm around my shoulder,
and we walked onto the road.
his voice was the melody,
screeching the accompaniment.
the spotlight,
a white
purer than the sun.

we’re merely strangers
disguised as a family.
four cornerstones
propping up the dinner table --
a doll house
when seen through a telescope, though
the peachy porcelain pillars are tarnished by
the cracks at their corners.
“perfect family” shines in neon lettering on the threshold.
it looms over us, frantically peppering the conversation
long gone stale.
it stings my eyes,
and burns my tongue
to speak.
my teeth are plastic,
my fingers plasticine,
pieced together carelessly
a millennia ago,
when warmth still existed in the spaces between us.
now, we are cloaked in our own despondencies,
eyes staring not at each other,
but through.
we float past each other
as ghosts;
though I’m the only one
who hears the echoes.