Once upon a time
there was, of course,
the universe
and all the thousands of stars that scraped against its sky like knives
and there were the planets that brooded under the canopy of oblivion
as if they'd each realised the pointlessness
to dancing with only their own animosity

and one of these planets was green and blue,
like acne against the hate-blackened expanse of forever.
And this planet, it called itself the world.

And in that world, once upon a time, there was a girl.

And this girl?
She thought in explosions.

Her eyes would close
and the grey coloured streets of her life
and her future would merge into one-
into her own personal nirvana,
the same colour futility as her flesh
and the girl would kneel down at dignity's bare feet
and she would name herself the champion of determination
as she fought for all of those who could not fight
and listened to the taste of foreign words on British tongues
and didn't quite collect the delicacy.

Her lashes would beat back the barbed-wire smiles of reality
and the inevitable exile of her past,
and against the white-washed, mandatory straight-line walls she'd willingly built her brain up to mimic,
the girl would sit and stop
and stop
and stop
and stop forcing herself into place
like a jigsaw puzzle piece that didn't quite fit-
and instead, she thought.

And her thoughts were explosions.

Her heart would empty itself
into her head
in the backseat of infinity's own 4 wheel drive,
and the boot would be filled with books that she'd read long ago,
(and then forgotten)
and the steering wheel would be turned only by metaphor,
or by the sort of similes that lose themselves
in a darkened room
to the words that grin
with shark-toothed ferocity into kisses.

When the girl's eyes were closed,
and her breathing was heavy
and locked away inside her ribs of glass
and her cage of self-inflicted agony,

the tears scrawled their way across her face
like blood that’s past it’s sell-by date-

and it was only when her eyes were closed that she understood that even when her eyes were open, they were not.

Even when she was awake, she was not awake.

The honeyed sunrise yawned its way across the horizon
like dreams, or maybe marker pen,
as if the sun was tired of telling the same bedtime stories to the moonlight that it always has-
and the girl was tired of
painting her personality the florid colours
that faded to a monochrome ice that burned,
and tired of hiding behind
some great façade of deprivation
that she did not feel
but yet the world still sent her the score to sing along to.

The girl was tired of this,
but still
she did not speak the explosions in her head

because out loud,
for real,
everyone knows that it doesn’t do to speak in explosions.

And the girl wished

that she could bombard the world
with all her hatred
and all her hope,
and she wished that she did not have to strip
the strafes of passion for the smallest things
away from her soul
like badly chosen wallpaper.

In this girl’s head, at least, her thoughts were explosions.

And yet,

she wanted to speak to raze the world
and shatter the stars

back into the oblivion that they came from.