Eight years old or so
I'm condemned to a joke
but I never understand the punchline
I just figure it's all a hoax.
Padded cells and restrained holds.
Perspex acrylic windows
render my spit useless.
My captors are fully grown
but I've seen the breadth of their moral compass
They will fold on it shortly now, I know they will.
Though they never do.

I'm fifteen years old give or take
when I lose my first child.
It was never born, but I know I wanted it.
I pretend I am not sure because
there's a lot of heat and pressure
cooking my heart, engulfing my head.

Crying over the phone to my girlfriend
a painful necessity, something my soul needs.
We are too young, careless, reckless,
confused and surrounded by ogling eyes.
I haven't had a lump of hot coal in my throat before
but it sure feels like I have when I try to speak.
Especially with my parents.

Pause, rewind
I'm six years old,
my younger sister is four,
my youngest is two.
My dad enters my play room.
Proceeds to tell me he's leaving home.
He won't be living with us anymore
but he'll always be my dad and
I'll always be his favourite and only son.

Dry my eyes and fast forward, please.
A little bit past devastation,
we'll stop somewhere around reckoning.
It's right after desperation.
I am fifteen years old again, some time has passed
since my unborn child left its mother
as nothing more than matter and blood.
The mother has left me.
Probably because
she was in even more pain than I
and wanted to confide and find comfort
anywhere else but in me.
I never could heal the wounds I helped to create.

It's time for work experience, I'm sixteen soon.
That's practically an adult in the UK
I get to work Queens' College May ball.
Maybe this time everything will be okay.
Shadowing sound technicians.
Sneakily drink the free *****,
since I always look much older.
Sun rises, I'm drunk and my mouth is dry.
I think I'll walk home.

Mum picks me up, I don't even remember why.
My hometown is only five miles across
I've travelled the best of it and then some.
Yet my gaze never left the sky.
I want to escape myself so badly I leap from the moving car.
I'm crying in the car one minute,
I'm crying on a roundabout of a dual carriageway the next.
The police arrive and mum's crying now.
Begging never worked before but this time it does.
The police officer says something about section one three six
and I am taken.

Whilst I wish I could have realised sooner,
I think I get the message now.
Perhaps I was never meant to achieve great things.
Or ever meant to find happiness in my life.
It could be that I was never meant to be anything
other than what I am and what I am
is the embodiment of sadness.
Unhappiness is tangible around me.
You can feel it, touch it and see it.
I can taste it and smell it, I breathe it.

It's me.
Me and me alone, surrounded by faces but alone.
The thought of loneliness is lonely indeed.
When thoughts are just emotions' greed
and it's our own expectations of life
that make it harder to succeed.
I've travelled cold, a road with no milestones.
Only icy tipped hurdles that are mountains
and I can't catch my sadness,
and I can't catch my breath.