Remember first trip
Saw bone structure piercing thru skin
Stretched too thin and taught
As if bones desperately needed escape
Reprieve from residing within you
Thought for sure was dead
Til Darkoesque wormhole protrudes
Now sure am dead

Lucky.

Some people would look at this little life of Grace and think, ****, she is lucky. Of course, you know better, don't you, Wonderland? You know what goes on in my hodge-podge head where the rainbows lament and the killers dance.

So come and tell me what my kiss tastes like. I want to know if the poison is evident or I'm just the one who can feel it.

Skeletons twirl on my walls, and that's not a metaphor. I literally have neon skeletons dancing on my walls. That's just the type of person I am.

No where. That's where we're going right now, with wonderful gibberings of a lost cockatoo, so lost she found herself in a young woman's body.

Lost little Grace, trying to find her place in the world, just like her beloved Alice. Yet Alice was always free of Wonderland at the end of the night. Or was she? She did always gravitate towards the insane place, maybe she's just as trapped as Grace.

Musings of the world as I grow, from young little wide-eyed girl to the woman I am today. A young woman, albeit, a naive, wide-eyed woman with too much hope in her heart, but a woman nonetheless.

The scars of your love leave me breathless. Oh no, no they don't. I hope mine have left you dead.

Still bitter I am how my caterpillar betrayed me. Have I not told this story? How in the dark of the night he found solace in the wings of another, to leave me blind to his deception. Thank the gods the March Hare had the sense to enlighten me.

Now I spend my nights in the arms of other, and I could not be happier. Never one solid man, never one stationary enough to become a character of Wonderland. But there enough so the loneliness does not creep up on me in the waking hours of the moon.

Stars are my companions now, yes, that's what they are. I am always stargazing and sometimes, when I'm lucky, I share my pantomimed sleep with them, pantomimed for of course I do not sleep.

So perhaps I am lucky, for I am a Grace surrounded by stars, and at the moment, I would not have it any other way.

Five. Cinco.

Half of the ten and a fifth of the twenty five. Mathematics are a funny subject, don't you think? Some man just made up letters to correlate with numbers to transcend to concepts that in all reality could mean nothing and the square root of a orangutan could actually be yellow.

I contemplate on that a lot, being the Grace that I am, wondering if what's real is real, if words are just words, or all they the pygmy hippopotamuses flying in my dreams. Anything is possible. Dreams could be reality, and reality could be a dream. Or maybe there is no such thing as realness, and everything is just madness.

I learned a lot from my friend the Mad Hatter, how to love, how to be disappointed, how to fall into a pit of despair and how to wear a hat like a ****** deviant and love it.

But the most important thing I learned is that sanity is very subjective, because what may seem totally sane to me, completely within the norm, may seem like complex incongruity to someone else. Maybe we're all mad. Maybe no one's mad. Maybe its just you, maybe its not you.

Special. That's another word that always got me, but I prefer to think in the realms that everyone is different. The world is in different shades and hues, none are ever quite the same, so why should people be that way?

But maybe yet again I'm only speaking in riddles and soliloquies and monologues and standing over all my conquests I am screaming my thoughts while they utter not a word, fearful of manic me.

I'd be afraid of manic me. She is quite the finger-twitching tyrant.

Words are words but are they real? Are they what you mean or are they just lies, lies, words that you scream until she dies, dies, and the world is at peace.

Oh, that's not right.

I once wrote a short poem similar to that I could recite by heart, but as my heart has changed the words become jumbled. Death creeps its way into lies, and heavy juxtaposition ***** with my meanings. Eating my words, until I am not a girl anymore, I am a leaf, or a bat, stuck in Wonderland until the end of my days.

Funny how Alice the savior became Alice the bat.

Wait, I'm not Alice, I'm Grace.

Oh, I do not know who I am anymore. And that is the tragic beauty of Wonderland. You just never know what, or who, tomorrow may bring.

I think I'm lost again

                                                                   I know exactly where you've been

I've been trying hard to reach you

                                                                        I know exactly where this ends

The cat says through the forest

                                                                    So I've traveled through the trees

It seems you've gotten further

                                                                               Please just wait a bit for me

I want to say I love you

                                                                                 Have I lost my little head?

I want to hold you close to me

                                                                              Holding on by just a thread

I came to say I miss you

                                                                         Though you're not so far away

I came out here to kiss you

                                                                Though I know just what you'll say

But if you kiss me back;

                                                                The thought brings a tear to my eye

Maybe I'm just going mad

                                                  Out here in Wonderland where dreams die.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

Water's running down my face, no, tears, their salt is melting into my very bones as I stare at the phone and listen to it, ring, ring, ring...

My caterpillar has finally turned into the beautiful butterfly I believed I dreamed of, only to find myself rejecting him now at every turn. His Grace has grown up, and realized his riddles and rudeness are not the love I deserve, not the one I want, not anymore.

Wonderland has changed, too. It has expounded upon itself, growing larger with newer faces, faces I'm growing to love and cherish more than old.

In the whispering hours of Wonderland, a New Frabjous Face takes my hand and tell me to run with him, and I do. We run and dance and even when the rain is pouring he is still holding my hands and my face and telling me to run and breathe and live so beautifully.

My caterpillar never held my hand in the rain, he always disappeared into the clouds with his booming voice, judging and screaming about his own struggles while I was drowning in mine. Wonderland tends to flood.

Forecast for now though is sunlight with a slight overcast of whimsy.

After the New Frabjous Face, I feel more comfortable in the rain. Maybe it is apart of me, especially since I always beg to go dancing in the rain. Maybe I knew all along the rain was the key to Wonderland.

Caterpillar would be glad to hear I've been forgetting my magical little pills, no safety is swirling through my veins. He always judged me for using them, though he insisted it was my choice. My choice that he disapproved of.

New Frabjous Face and other new friends are new to me, but they makes me feel alive again, like maybe Wonderland can be a happy place again, like maybe the Jabberwocky can learn its place once more.

Ring, ring, ring...

And as the night goes on, I turn away the phone and let it ring, for it doesn't own my heart anymore.

I do.

I had a dream once
Circular in reason
Teasing me
Bruised and beaten
Sleeping
I wandered angelic
Dorothy and Alice
Through nightmare geographies
Landscapes cruel, beautiful
And strange
Talking crows
Enveloped my eyes
A crown of pearlescent feathers
Obscuring my vision and yet
I saw
A waterfall of tears
A guru on a lotus
He whispered
Whiskey breath and sleepy eyed
A hep cat hipster in hemp cap
Gin and tonic gripped
Like a life preserver
“All you need is love”
And I wandered
Lost