How oddly comforting it is to live in a place where we’re never alone,
Where a friend to talk to,
Or perhaps a long-since past captured moment
All live inside the screen of a phone.

Where we seek momentarily vibrant entertainment,
A single click away from any form of instant gratification,
Thirty seconds of an advertisement are too long a wait
To listen to an empty, hollow song.
There is no more journey, only destination.

Teased for anything that makes one stand out,
Young boys and girls are taught to be vain.
Flooded with images of perfection
Who needs uniqueness when we can all be the same?

Neon signs, boastful words, glimmering lights,
“Progress”, we call it,
Conceal the smoke and grime,
The poisoned seas and wheezing forests.
Yet we never take the hint,
Even when it’s plastered around, a collection of signs
Pushing our problems on the next generation to solve,
We’ve made it this far, so we’ll never die…
Right?

Society is split,
And it was greedy hands that cut the cake,
Making it look like a chart,
Of the pie variety,
One of the ones that has one vast, delicious chunk,
And the rest is so small
That the figures are written off to the side.
Just crumbs left to eat for the frightening numbers of those
Born below that line
Such twisted irony:
For the one of the cheapest foods in the store
Is flour.

No happiness for the ones at the bottom
Except for patriotic half-truths.
“All men are created equal.”
So are bricks I suppose.
Except that in a pyramid, most are destined to lay
Close to the ground,
Worn, chipped, and dust-covered,
And but a few gleam in the golden rays of the sun,
The few on top, bathed in wealth.
But without its base, the system will crumble.
At least that’s what they say.

So we let ourselves be told how to think,
Never looking outside our bottles and bubbles for the source of reasoning.
“She’s a sinner, he’s just lazy.”
Such cruel things about unfortunate souls
The crowd can say.
But why?
“Because they chose to be that way.”
It’s simple of course, when only the individual
Can be to blame.

Society’s sentencing
Replacing the need for a God in a way,
Chains of morality, while amorphous through time
Have always been and will always stay.

And we judge without stopping to think,
Who told us that this is the way to think,
To think about why it is that we think
In this way.

Floating inside our bubbles and bottles,
Too steeped in others’ thoughts and words
To lift our chins,
Look around
And think of our own.

We’re ever marching forward,
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Effectively staying in place.
Though the landscape around us ebbs and flows
In our nature,
Essentially we never changed.

We were stumbling back to the car, late at night on aching feet,
Our worn out voices sounding raspy and weak
Makeup smudging on our eyelids and cheeks

Arms entangled, it started with you looping your arm through mine,
Then my hand found its way to your shoulder
And somehow we were holding hands again
It was all a blur.

Your words were slow and slurring
As if you were thinking through honey
For me not so,
my mind quick as ever to put my thoughts into words

Instead my insides felt fizzy
Your blurring remarks making me giggly.
“That’s a church”
You mutter faintly,
Waving a hand towards the Cathedral
Giggles escape from my mouth,
Growing into laughter
I try to make it sound dainty.

Perhaps the passerby thought we were drunk,
But we hadn’t had a sip of alcohol
You were drunk on tiredness and music
And I was high on dying love and music.

Sleepy seabirds rest their heads
On downy white feathers
Azure ripples glimmering
In crystalline splendor.

Dry brushed clouds lounge peacefully
In porcelain skies
Seabirds take to lazy flight,
Echo mewling cries.

Golden flecks swirl glimmering,
In indents left by feet.
Coin-sized ***** scuttle away,
No wish to become meat.

I cannot write!
For my mind is plagued
With thoughts of a beautiful girl.

Think, rich and heavy, like flattened layers of gouache paint slathered onto a canvas, meant to portray peeling layers of pearly alabaster, glowing white stripped away to reveal dusty blues, steely grays, and muted purples.

This is a tale of love and a tangled lie,
An apology.
A letter to a brown eyed firefly.
Our players being a naive spark,
Lost in feelings without a map
A broken, bittersweet charmer,
A dancing, reading dreamer with his face always turned to the skies,
And of course, the rosy orange firefly with warm coffee-bean eyes.
I hope that fireflies can glow a rosy orange, but my knowledge on this matter can’t be promised.
We live in a dreary place, one without lightning bugs to keep us honest.

A charming schemer once began to toy with a young, carefree spark,
Pushed her away when she got too close.
He tried to win her back, trying for a fresh, clean start
But soon he realized her trust was something to earn.
She was frighteningly cold when she was angry,
But even frozen, sparks have a tendency to burn.

As she brooded, pain and confusion kicking up a spiteful flame,
The bitter boy found a firefly, another pretty light with whom to play his game.

The spark’s young heart began to thaw, but the charmer continued to play and tease.
Wanting to shield herself from heartbreak, the spark turned her attention to a dancing, stargazing dreamer.
He made her feel much more at ease.

Firefly whispered to the spark, in girlish gossip,
Admitting to a love affair with the charmer, whose lips she could only describe as delicious.
But to the firefly’s chagrin, the bitter boy had demanded that their romance remain surreptitious.

The reading dreamer had a beautiful mind, his intelligence capturing spark’s glow.
But his lust for her, while with respect, was not something she cared to know.
Caught in a romance with the dreamer boy, while her desire for the charmer began to grow.

And so the game of cat and mouse resumed, until the spark succumbed to a kiss, too great was the desire.
The charmer told her there was no one else...
Poor firefly. Her lover was a liar.

A bruised plum mark seared into her neck
Dimmed the spark’s glow in burning shame.
Next day when told that charmer boy had left his firefly, she cursed herself, for she was the one to blame.

Such a tangled web of lies, all from the foolish girl’s mistake.
She’d tried to force a romance with her starry-eyed dreamer boy,
In finding that his feelings were one-sided, she’d tried to feel something new
With someone who treated her as if she were a plaything, just a toy.

And out of debt and friendship,
she comforted poor firefly, with words like balm, but all in vain:
For when the leaves turned yellow, charmer and firefly were in bed together, just the same.
But this time, charmer called it a dalliance, and but a pitiful echo of romance and sweetness remained.

Confusion thickened in the mapless maze, when once the firefly let slip
Ephemeral infatuation had overcome her in the spring when looking at the spark,
And all the lanterns of the maze were dimmed,
Wavering flickers in the hazy dark.

But truth came quickly to her mind,
As spark dreamed more and more of the firefly,
Spark loved her soul, her soft full lips,
And in doing so, she condemned her own youthful heart to die.

Oh such sweet torture fate had concocted for the foolish spark.
To crave the one she had betrayed.
To carry a love unrequited, all while watching the firefly’s innocent kindness be wasted away.

And this, dear readers, is the last chapter of this tale.
The spark left the dreamer, realizing her heart had been hiding behind a flimsy veil,
For she found herself more drawn to nymphs than gods.
And now there are three suffering heartbreak,
The dreamer missing his bright spark, the firefly wishing for just a simple date,
The spark knowing she’ll have to let a fate with the firefly slip away.
If only I had known my actions would cause you this much pain.

And so,
I’d like to apologize.
I can’t do it in person,
Cowardice being my excuse.
I can’t even call you by your proper name, because you can’t know this letter is for you.
So in my writing, you were a firefly.
A firefly burned by a spark.
And as a spark I’ve yet to learn,
Altruistic in every other path of life,
Not to yield to Selfishness:
The vice that doomed my soul to burn.

I can’t stand the sickly sweet, falsetto love songs on the radio anymore.
Because ghost of your lips on mine lingers,
Because I’ve kissed you a thousand times in my dreams
And I’ve woken up alone, longing for you to be by my side, a thousand times more.
I reach for you, my light at the end of the dock.
Like the flash of a Polaroid camera when dusk is falling
Recounting and decoding moments that we’ve lived, a mindless brush of your hand against mine that meant nothing to you searing itself into my skin and memory.
Perhaps it would’ve been easier if I’d known from the start that you’d never be mine.