Tangible toys to trifle with
Telescopes and televisions and telephones
Teaching us to tick and tock
Telling us time
Trading touches for tricks
Though doesn't it seem just so?

The collective ties then tears
Tucking individualism into sleep
Terrors of the twilight to wake and hint
Tweaked in turbulence to set the sails smooth
Trying at contentment to dig up but contempt
Though doesn't it seem just so?

Telepaths and tellers on muted megaphones
Teething a societal infant proves troublesome
Tight jawed and spoonfed
Track the time travellers, the ****** heretics
Tennessee in '33 preached inequality
Though doesn't it seem just so?

My birthday is today
Seventeen years since another Sunday at 9 AM
On top of a mountain called Ozark
In a land that reminded me of Harry Potter
Called Pettigrew like Peter
It's forests elicited sprites and daddy long legs
Made of me a changeling then spit me back out

I learned what real ice tea was at the age of three
It was my birthday
Doing Pirouettes on my aunts Patio
Again, under Arkansas stars
With faery lights leading my way
I ascended to the brush behind the house
Got lost in the greens and browns of paradise's supply
Returned with flesh painted the colour of love

In an apartment overlooking crab apple trees
Fresh Canadian foliage fostering a well concealed creek
On a 90 degree angle over a dark chocolate cake
My ninth birthday
I drank pickle juice because Vinny said it was limonade
I wore dresses that year
And coveted baskets filled to brim with blossoms
Baked the crab apples into a pie
But preferred mama's banana cream
I wore bandages on my arms
and grass stains on my knees
My tears washed away like Crayola markers
And my biggest inner questions had to do
With what was for breakfast
And the lifespan of a temporary tattoos

14 came with a ******* bow
Done up gaudily in greys with a sad little smile
Three years marked with pink splotches and lines
A subject to hormones and arsenic tones
My birthday
A celebration of decay
And mama still sang, and baked, and kissed my face
And didn't wake when I placed cotton ***** in her ears
Because I was a happy girl

Today is my birthday
And mama exclaims
"No more babies! All four of you are so grown!"
But the mirror still illustrates an odd little show
With a baby face
A girls chest
And a womans hips
An ordinary freak all stitched up
Awkward and too much of everything
But not enough all the same
And inside I know
Is a sea of paradoxical Samanthas
Some stubborn and loud
Some shy and reserved
All with changes to make
Books to read
And places to go
And  only few that are quite wanting yet
To be 17

Empress, Goddess;
indulge in the excess.
Address me as no less
Than Your Highness
If you would please.
And Brethren, Sistren!
To me you will be
Chief! Sire!
Oh, I swear it,
Whatever you desire.
And Namaste as you
Walk away
And two souls kiss;
All at one
Not one amiss!
Please remember!
Please do not dismiss,
So much power
In the ether
reverberating up-throat
Out of mouth,
Into ears,
Over-the-brain coat.
Pick, and be picky;
Honey'd words
Or the tang of
Sarcasm; dryness of
Dull wit
Just don't be a twit with it,
Or spare the detail
Or talk too quick or
Mumble with snails
Indulge in the excess!
Be no less
than Empress,
oh my sun, my excellence!
All sat in
The hello,
Laid down in the goodbye
It's woven in
With the expanse of a sky
Possibility! A chance!
A face to smile
And coo with,
Hold close for a while
But there, a shut door
fallen with
An ugly salutations,
I say again,
Indulge, indulge!

The physicality of beauty has failed me, and so in desperation I pled; Oh Lord, Oh God, at least give me this!
My folly, not his. I proved to be mute (my prayers unheard). For though I prayed wholeheartedly, the union of pen and paper proclaimed loudly it's unholiness.
Condemned to be an observer unable to make sensible the raging winds of words in my brain. Incapable of sculpting the clay of my thoughts into a form of any recognizable sort.
Albeit He is merciful, and with wide eyes and wide ears I soak up spectrums of magnificence,
Daring not to wish my flesh might be coloured the vibrant hues I absorb.

Ever since
A is to B as
C is to D
My life was a metaphor
Subtly so, so I
Wouldn't quite see it
In it's full
Extravagance
Until today;
now, this moment
no, this moment...
All the moments!
See our senses for one
Four and one, five
Flimsy and full at once
But definitive of our world
Nonetheless
And to a blind man with
five take one, Four
Really take him
And behold his
View
And later meet
The man with Six
who, on his face,
two and one
Three eyes sit
And then you will see
None of us do really see!

Life is a metaphor
what has been
Will show 'gain soon
And did you know the suns a star?
and earth did make the moon?
Little things
In skin and soil
iron core and soul
They swim and make
Create. And did you know
That there's more
diversity, equality, population, growth
A million miles down?

The whole of the sky
Infinite, marvelous
Forged in a blink
Hot and quick and microscopic
But her name, recall!
Universe
*only one

A dancing child; a ballerina
A pirouetting adolescent; *an anorexic

In the night I am beautiful
Ubiquitous, ambiguous; I am without flaw
Words dissipate, quiet fills my lungs
My song, but a curl of smoke

Wildberries bleed in between two fists
I clench, bury fingers deep in fleshy fruit
Oozing out and spinning with seeds to the floor below
Licking my forearms, wrists, fingertips
Trying to taste at that sweet ambrosia
To find but bittersweet
Too-ripe-raspberry instead

It is the jovial, gentle gradient of your first love
Transcending from the kind of blue that swims under a blanket of flesh on the topmost part of her wrist
Into an orange so pale it could just be pink;
Reminiscent of the peach of her cheeks
Dampered by the dreariness of a stormy Sunday noon
Light shrouded in the mysticism of "what if's" and "why"
It is the turbulence of heartbreak
Escaping with the breath you held in too long
Sighing a song of failed attempts and discarded hope
Dressed in the melancholy of grey-blue, exasperatingly clouding over in surrender;
The kind of dark that makes you wonder if it is pathetic fallacy
Or maybe just a coincidence that the sky can seem so sad.
All at once placid
Milky and cold and fresh as the first glass of Bessie's byproducts
It is the clarity accompanying self assurance
The comfort in the knowledge that blue is just a shade away from blue-grey
Cotton ***** on a sheet of glassy water
Just enough to get you through midday
Until scorching it sets, and your cat nap is marked with a rigid back and stood-up hairs
It is a blaze of passionate glory
The first crimson drop from the blood orange
Only to dilute before you into a tangerine so vivid you have to question if maybe your eyes are just over-dramatizing its hue.

11: 41 My step father yells at my mother, she yells back
11:46 They do not catch me on the bottom step listening like a child, ear to the wall
11: 52 The floor creaks and my hands find themselves in the top drawer, third to the right, mamas dresser
11: 55 The game begins and two fierce blades are extracted
11: 58 Peach, silver, crimson. Peach, silver, crimson. Peach, silver, crimson.
12: 06 I am still not asleep and I will not sleep not now or ever again.

I stop halfway
In most endeavors
because halfway
leaves space for me to wonder
halfway is my view
of the moon
of the stars
of venus sometimes
and it is always perfect
never tainted with the stench closeness can bring
the cemented knowledge
of a yes or a no
the lines come from my mind
halfway done
a frayed string
that I may pull and mutilate
as I see fit
halfway so
they don't see
I don't see
the inconsistency
that marks my brain
and in my fashion
(it's really become a trademark)
I will leave abruptly
and cold
and half heartedly
because my halfway head
is somewhere else

Shaking hands to match my insides
Where a meaty heart quickens neath a milky bone cage
Uneven lungs twitching
Half filled with soot slithering up throat
Twining to ebony flume
Shaking head to match my hands; asphyxiations byproduct

I am a master of Half-Truths
An artisan of rhetoric
So skilled in the craft that
I have lost the ability to
Differentiate between fact and fable
My thoughts are a flume of paint
Colouring ***** water
But the fish do know
What is swimmable and substantial and timeless
And they kiss at the river beds
Tickle the hollows of my ear drum
Eliciting a perpetual popping sound, bubbles I presume
Reality fuzing as O2 with a shield impermeable to the waves
But it draws on my heart
wholehearted admirer of beauty that I am
To be constantly checked
With a map set to fluoresce
An blinders on
I paint my trails

I have never wrote about nothing
I've told my self to a million
two million times to date
to sit and write about nothing but
my mind proves magnetic
Sticking to the simple things
Romanticizing specs and sweeping monuments
because I write to find some solace
and normally
my greatest comfort is intellectual
spiritual stimulation
I like getting high and
watching TedTalks and Michio Kaku videos
about string theory and is there an eleventh dimension?
And I like to lay down still
And torture myself by letting my skin crawl
with untouched bug bites
with my eyes closed until my arms feel
detached and my chest is heavy and all of my flesh is static
For a while it is black and I hear the looping of
the rain and wind chimes of CenterPointe
And I like the meditation tapes but silence has its virtues
Ascension is always lighter and more arid
Languid in a way water can only ever mock
I think it might have something to do with
oxygen being ubiquitous in our atmosphere
or more so than h2o that is
but then again I really am no Bio major

Outcasted kid with purple hair

Albeit not the kind of violet
That made your nostrils drip
With a watery ambrosia
Sugary enough to belong to a bee

And not the kind of
heavy, royal, omnipresent
contentment plum presents as a
molten lava
perfecting the pockmarks in the pie

My tendrils were not reminiscent of
home or
anything savoury so

I tangled them in tiaras
belonging to some Duchess' daughter or
one of Henry's wives or

Maybe twined them round
Frita's pallet and
Dyed my scalp a more pleasing hue or
Anything other than purple

Because purple was what I was not
Purple was Lilacs and
Pansies and Heliotropes and Tulips and
Lavender and

That little wild flower aforementioned

whose name I can't bare say
for the sake of
a humble beauty
such as hers

'twould be a shame to make comparable
To the wet-dog-fur look
Of my purple hair

And so I learned to get lost

In a past I always felt my own
Traveling continents and
Floating through eons

While my classmates  coloured in
British Columbia and
Where is Nunavut again?

Growing, I gained companions

A faery,
Athena,
Aslan and
Frodo, Einstein, Plato,
Theodore Geisel, Mahatma Ghandi
and Louis Leakey, Jamal Dewar,
Joan of Arc and John Lennon and
it all became
more complicated

Because my world was in flux
Oh it ebbed and it flowed and it expanded
Like the molten plum but this time
It really was more like lava

Assuredly you'll understand;
See the seams in our stitching!
Our Worlds are sewn together!

And as much as we would like
to cling to our
individualism

at some point we all must
accept that there is
but one

Intrinsic as our innards
Are our atoms and
Electrons and
mine are yours and
yours are hers and
ours together are all of the stars and
it really is
beautiful

At some point the twisting shroud
The squeezing and contracting -
of the world inside my head and
the world inside my eyes and
the world I was walking around in
and the world that I saw above me -
it tensed then halted
and became very dense
then melted

What a glorious
Ubiquitous, secure and everlasting amalgamation!
I opened my eyes
To find Van Goghs Scissors
All bloodied still and so
I cleaved my purple hair

But to find Hieronymus' oils and
watercolours so
I made my skin a hellish canvas
Painted all in yellows and blues
Without a hint of purple

Now from shoulders to forearm to wrist
from breast to navel to hip
from thigh to calf to foot
legible as anything are
lines that lilt and gleam
sighing songs of
devils and cherubs alike
and of sparrows and snakes

So after heaven is hell
and after hell is Nirvana
And Manna is as good as dirt
if Ambrosia is but
the spit of a bee

It all always works out
Because at the end comes
Death and after that
We don't know
But I do know that
I don't know
Much at all to begin with

Except for four things, almost assuredly:
1. Energy is all
2. I will never cease to find shouting at people from my bedroom or a car window amusing
3. My mother loves me more than anyone
4. Nothing is certain, except for uncertainty

When the crowd is turned on you,
and your last line of defense walks away,
and there's no place to call home
and the streets become too cold to stay.
I see you walking, never run.

When did you lose yourself, when did you go?
Always a question, but you never know.
So out of touch here! Mind miles away...
But you're dissonant dear, still not much to say.
So you hide behind your faery tales,
sing life is but a dream,
Then row your boat, first set your sails,
Into the blue you flee

To drown in the void; a steadfast oxymoron
But I am struggling to stay afloat
My limbs lack sensation, mockery of my mind
Vocal cords cut, stolen that night in the snow
Carried to the cosmos on an angels back
Helen, how you torment me!
A thousand whispers, torrential and coaxing
To find silence would be all end all; greatest defeat
But what a warrior I found in you,
Quiet and it's little reverie
Infinite; feeling as though I should explode
The quickness of newly discovered emption uncontainable
But in solidation I am weak, without your armed defences
And Helen is touching my skin again

Sundays are my favourite days,
Beirut mornings to coax a smile
Get drunk and dressed with
Mr. Vernon; light a cigarette
And laugh at the irony

This Sunday though,
I am in a sundaze;
with no full moon to look upon
And only a mournful quarter
rotted with black cloud

The two oxides must have
Grown tired of the love triangle and
Left carbon hanging
And in his solitary bitterness
To freeze.
And his vibrations dulled
Like the conglomerate of
Hydrogens and oxygens
Closely knit and kissing
Creating crystalline
Crosses and flakes, only
In his
Mournful wake,
Diamonds coalesced,
And he showed me
A sky of grey
And today that is all
That there is

Spider web lace, a crown
snow stuck to it and tinkled
All the quiet little sounds.
Crouching in the forests cover
I froze my little heart.
He drowned me in the lake
The scene a work of art.

Angels carry swords
And seldom smile or sing
They aren't much for words
They don't wear crowns or rings.
He broke all of my bones
And took all he could take
I froze my little heart
He drowned me in the lake
I screamed and kicked
I tried to flee
He left his dirt
I scrubbed my skin to bleed

Speaking with only seventeen years seen so far,
I say assuredly, the secret to longevity is Insanity.
Once a day -Twice to be Safe, Thrice to be sure- take two spoonfuls of Crazy.
Dance, Sing, Cry, Scream in Wonder!
Yell at the Universe, I am here! I see, I feel, I love, Oh
I am here! See me, Smell me, Shake me with passion
And a Sweet Scatterbrain

Eye, I and I

                   The first telling me
                       Never to think
                            *But to be

                                                            ­                                          And the latter
                                                                ­                                      Screaming, taunting
                                                        ­                                             Appropriation!
                                              ­                                                        Opprobrio­us little thing!

                                     The middle cowering
                                                      ­     Shaking as she
                                      Soars through
                                                         ­  Calmest winds
                                      And brushing
                                                        ­Turbulent ocean

     She hurts and
      Radiates the suns spit
                                                     Permeable gooseflesh
                                                     Absorbing any confusion
                                                       ­                         
                                                                                              Processing and mulling it over
                                                            ­                                                                              
                                                                                                                                      With plastic hands
                                                           ­           Caressing her feathers
                                                        ­                      Pulling her into
                                                            ­             The stormy cold of Id

              While she meditates on
              The notion that she is

            To be absent of thought
                                            
           Translucent and hollow

                                    A reflection of skies and seas

Beating her wings
     Desperately to catch the

            Sinking sun or
            Hook the rising moon
                                                            ­                                                                 ­             
                                                   ­                                 Alas she is lost
                                     Manufactured materials
                                                       ­       Clogging her pores
                                                                ­                     Infecting her eyes
                                                            ­                                                Trying to trick her
                                                                ­                                                                 ­              Into being but one

                                                           ­                  But three she will be,
                                                           ­                        Three I's with
                                                            ­                         Three Eyes

To see the maidens yesterday                            The mothers today                            The crones tomorrow
                                                        
       ­                                                                 ­               Wholly

                                                     ­                                   Never to
                                                                ­               Cease or halt or falter

                                                         ­                     Or question the reality
                                                                ­                     Of the intrinsic

                                         And never
                                                      To trust, to touch
                                                                           The grand illusion
                                                                                                    Of material worth

I lay dreaming, stretching, sleeping .
You beside, fall into me
Weeping.

Now I'm rousing,
Sore and drowsy,
I pull you close as you sigh loudly:

"How long will you love me,
Before it's all too much?
Because I fear I may lose myself
In the rhythm of your touch.
And I know you don't like promises,
Expectations and their weight...
And I don't really either,
But what if this is fate?"

Toes tangled in cotton,
Egyptian clean white,
Your tears falling silent
As stars in the night.

Your eyes dilating in-lust
I search without warrant
Find missing that which I seek
Pleading, I am copious torrent
Coming in waves, leaving in a timely fashion