What a cast of characters
we parade through this play-life,

they're dying Juliet deaths 'til we're bereft,
pondering the qualities of the stage light:

how it caresses empty sets with as much grace as our dramas,
unrequited in its love of the playwright.

Sunshine!
Sickly yellow
slow-light colored streaks
slithering worse than sweat
down my body.
That golden ball stares down at me
like a haughty goddess,
her duality shallow and hot.
She cares not for the freedoms of humans.
She's a two-faced coin,
purgatory masked by the promise
of freedom from pained brains
and scholarly shackles.
The sun laughs at her own trickery, gargling through melting teeth
as she collects suppressed confessions
from weakened teens.
When her crescent counterpart
offers solace from her torment,
the moonlit darkness
only serves to drown us
and we splutter in our own
self-taught
year-round
lies.
And the sun
rears her tattered, flaming mane
at daybreak,
belly-laughing at idle minds now unrefined,
gleefully adding her own scorch
to already inflamed brains.

I hurt with the pleasure of carving knives
plunged into blood-lusting hands.
Standing in the storm of stab wounds
and searching for Gods dressed in human
to give me mental medicine
for wounds that they must trust me to see.
I am the glass-tongued mediator.
I am the vortex that turns worlds to ink-soaked scenery
and words to black noise.
They gurgle out blandishments like they're true! And to them,
I'm a glass door to better days;
they put their famished hands
onto my handle and tug for good luck.
I open and warble out what they want to hear;
a fortune teller who cries courtesies and fills her glass ball
with a concoction of
tears and liquid caution.
I don't want to lose them.
But I choke on their
distorted, glazed looks,
I stuff my throat with gauze,
my chest fills with blood
as they throw their clocks into the garbage
and raise me on glass pedestals
and drool praises as I cry for me
and for them and
for us
and for-
Useless. I am useless.
Wasteful. I am wasteful.
Broken. I am and should be broken.
Did anyone ever realize? How would they
when I am so selfishly unselfish?