The Last Dawn
<p>I used to smile
At the simple things</p><p>Birds in their tree's</p><p>Individual blades of pristine grass </p><p>Emerging from the soft green ground</p><p>In the months of May </p><p>Whispers of clouds smiling in the perennial blue sky </p><p>
</p><p>I used to smile</p><p>
</p><p>The birds became invaders, inhabiting, inhibiting branches in imprisonment </p><p>Wondrously waiting beside widow frames waking sleeping souls</p><p>In the&nbsp;early hours of morning</p><p>Each mirroring the others malicious motive</p><p>
</p><p>Green bodkins standing silently, shyly, surreptitiously from the&nbsp;ground </p><p>In dangerous armies, ably awaiting anarchy </p><p>Waiting for&nbsp;the next victim to lie down and imprint themselves </p><p>With the sharp mark of a militarial colony </p><p>
</p><p>Cloudy climes taunting the world&nbsp;</p><p>With wordless whispers of&nbsp;a place they'll never be </p><p>A fictitious future of fortune unforgotten in fervent faces </p><p>
</p>Dreams don't dare come true
I used to smile
But complex connotations connected to life
Came forth contrasting common belief
Eyes acknowledge the awakening of time
Telling of tales told to obscure openly the opaque lies of our own world
Nothing is as simple
As birds in trees
Grass in the months of May
Whispers in perennial blue skies
Lego bricks
It's almost as simple as Lego bricks
Building one's way to the stars
As easy as hiding behind a face with a smile
It's just snapping one half to a half
When you're finished, you're there and it's over
The creator of a miniature world
Pristine in the moment for a minute
Until falling apart it unfurls
Those bricks become tears in an ocean
Unimportant and meaningless to most
Except to the one whose assembled
The little town, little people. Now ghosts
It's almost as simple as Lego bricks
Tearing one's self apart
All it takes is a little disturbance
To find yourself back at the start
They see it as merely just a hobby
Creating those Lego brick towns
But those worlds spawn from your emotion
And it's you that comes crashing down
The master builder behind a manual
The hands of a strange construction
Is but a child, broken and damaged
An architect of one's own destruction
Once Upon a Dream
She stares at the at the wax paper, sealed delicately by a red stamp. Cinderella glances over each shoulder cautiously before breaking the seal of the letter in her hand.
'I invite you on behalf of the prince to join us for the royal ball'
The girl allows herself a moment of happiness, twirling round and round smiling merrily, blonde hair thrown out behind her. She's spinning, practicing her movements with a nearby broom, though old and worn still serving as a suitable partner. Dust imitates surrounding ball gowns as it's thrown up in the air by graceful sweeping movements. Her laughter dies in her throat as she catches sight of herself in the mirror. Her rags masking what's underneath. She approached her own reflection with slight fear, as if what she's staring at isn't her. She frantically pulls at her face trying to smooth out the rounded edges of her cheeks and chin. She turns to one side, slowly smoothing down the front of her apron, frowning at her rounded stomach. Flailing her arms out in desperation she notices that they wobble ever so slightly. She's disgusted. But not for long as she's not allowed the moment 'CINDERELLA! GET UP HERE GIRL' picking up her skirts she runs up the cellar stairs, hating how she feels the fat around her thighs making itself noticed.
The weeks go by and she's determined to go to the ball. She's skipping meals, three of them a day. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Her stepsisters and stepmother don't notice. Of course they couldn't care less, too busy about themselves to notice the small paling service girl. They fuss about their hair, their shoes, their faces. 'Pull it a little tighter Anastasia',
'A little more blush Drizella'
The next time Cinderella looks in the mirror her face is sunken and ghostly white. Her collar bones are jagged and sharp, poking at flesh that seems to have deteriorated. She can see her ribs and the way her heart palpitates quickly, she should be worried but she marvels at this fact, casting her smiling gaze upon her fairygod mother behind her. Alas she is a shining princess, glowing with happiness, riding to the ball in her ringing carriage.
The prince is dancing with her smiling, hands gripping her minute waist. It's so surreal, but the beeping in the distance is even more real. The clocks are chiming their way to midnight. So she runs as fast as she can out of the ball, away from the fantasy of the evening. Leaving only behind one glass slipper. But no mater how hard, how far he searches the prince will never find his princess. She is lost in the forest. Passed out on the floor, unable to breathe. She's convinced that it's the dress, pulled way too tight, but no, it's her own ribs weighing down, heavily crushing her lungs. Then her fairy godmother is here. No longer waving her hands in magical grace, but instead in frantic movements. The ringing of her carriage is accompanied by red flashing light and her ball gown is a loose fitting, short and clean piece of polyester.
And as the princess awakes from her fantasy a voice is there in the room
'excuse me miss, do you remember anything, you're in the hospital'
A princess who never found her prince charming.
The Words that Voice Salvation
She sits on the beanbag, age 14. Rounded spectacles perched delicately on the bridge of her nose, digging in so familiarly that the red indents just between her eyes have become one perfect imperfection. She’s hidden under a sweater, large and grey- it might as well be a dress, given how it just covers her knee caps. The window protects her from the outside world, rain drops like tears blurring the view with a steady continuous stream of water. The image is distorted. Everything is distorted. Everything but the soft leather in her hands, cushioning wax paper, yellowed with time and age. To others, the voices in her mind are crazy, just another indication that she has slowly started her descent into insanity. But she knows they're people. Characters that whisper out carefully through pages, characters that live in the walls of her little world.
She sits on the sidewalk, age 18. Rounded spectacles still cracked and broken from that time she leaned out of the window too far. She’s huddled up in the corner, a cassiterite vessel sat at the ends of her crossed knees. Her head buried between the binding of the book she may have knocked off of a library shelf. She’s absorbed, the only hope she has of escaping is the rattle of coins against the little tin can. The rattle of salvation, an answer to her plea.
She sits against the cold, bare, white wall, age 23. She’s abandoned the rounded spectacles, they don’t fit her face anymore. The cracks that meander their way through the plastered walls reflect the scars that trace her body. The room is bare, metal bed frame pushed up against the far wall, metal bars that protect her from the outside world. The rain no longer blurs are her view, her own tears cloud her vision now. An orange jumpsuit, too big for her small, frail figure.
But, despite where she sits, age 23. Age 24. Age 25. Even the chains tugging on her wrists fail to stop her from holding open the pages that keep her from her own, torturous reality.
Nothingness
There’s something beautiful and strange in nothingness
In the way echoing, cavernous capsules create
In the endless expanse of sky filled with just space
In the drowned mass of the worldly waters
There’s something in nothingness
For nothing has to be something
For us to see and breathe the breaths we take
While surrounded by oblivion
Oblivion that surrounds us
There’s something alive and living in nothingness
Our lives are just voids of imagination
The false object of our own creations
The nightmares that are dreamed up in dreamless sleep
The thoughts that we use to blanket the expanse of our world
We are the nothingness
We create the something
It is our own doing that both constructs madness
And destroys sanity
Yet somehow labels the madness as the sanity
We are our downfall
There is something dangerous and mysterious in nothingness.
Ignorance of Mind
How can we see?
Into the depths of the trees
That blanket forest floors
When we live
In a world so white and black
That our eyes deceive us
Forbid us from venturing further
To see the beauty underneath a skin
How can we hear?
Hear the secret words
Hidden in the sparrow's wing beats
When we live
In a world that heard what it willed
That refused to understand the voices
Shouted from the blues of the sky
And the depths of the oceans
How can we feel?
Embrace the cool breeze
Of Summer's mercy on a hot day
When we live
In a world that refuses to feel
The emotion of strangers
Whoes pain is displayed like the feathers of a peacock
Through the tears running marathons down their faces
How can we taste?
Sweet bursting of spring time berries
Picked from their homes by delicate hand
When we live
In a world that refuses to taste
The metallic twang of a knife
The bittersweet vengence
Of the all wrongdoing
How can we smell?
Pungent fragrances of flowers
Blooming in the vases on the windowsill
When we live
In a world that refuses to smell
The natural freshness of the earth
That needs not a man's hand
To improve upon all that has been created
How can we accept?
The very faces of our own
Staring back from mirrored surface
When we live in a world
That refuses to accept
The differences between people
The suffiency of nature provided
The eventual inevitable end
The Fit Guy With The Labrador
Early morning walks in the park are adventures. Especially in winter. The air is always so fresh and clean, slightly cold as it hits your cheek. Just enough to wake you up just a little bit more. The leaves fall off the branches landing softly onto the ground. But the bare trees aren't embarrassed, they're all like that, there’s a confidence in the way nature is. Even the flowers that miraculously survive to this point are brave enough to open up to the sun that peeks in the sky. Nothing is unfamiliar or alone. The magpies are always in their twos and the squirrels chirp at each other, celebrating when they unearth a nut. Even the soil is happy. The strangers on their morning jogs with their dogs, or clutching hot coffee cups are enough to make you smile. They aren’t strangers so early in the morning. You know them through routine, through the way they greet you, whether it be with a 'hi' or 'hello' or a wave of a hand or a nod of a head, you know them. It's not like you need their names; 'fit guy with the Labrador' and 'the old lady who looks like a Doris' and 'the fashionable middle aged woman' will do for names. It's more personal in way, they're not just 'Dave' or 'Jan' or 'Georgia', they mean something, they're not just names, they're observation and personality.
Then again late night walks in the park are a different story. Especially in winter. The air lost its freshness long ago, now you just inhale the sickening smell of tobacco and cigarette smoke, mixed with a lingering stagnant stench of alcohol. The air is windy and the breeze, harsh. It seems to tug teasingly at the opening of your coat, whipping cheeks, cracking lips. Leaves that fall, screaming as they hit the ground, the bare trees saddened as the familiar crunch of a heavy drunken boot bites down, splitting the stem in half. Flowers close and hide in fear of the darkness. The birds have nestled away and chirp warnings instead of greetings, mother's calling out to their young, demanding them to come home quickly. The strangers in the park are strangers. Dangerous mysterious, drenched in secrecy. They are shadows, only just illuminated by the orange dimness of tall looming street lamps. It's personal, but in a frightening way. You recognize the orange spot of a cigarette butt underneath hoods, the outlines of beer bottles clenched tightly in people’s hands, large dogs straining their leashes, violently kept at owners sides snarling. This isn't observation, it's being alert, aware.
The night is a stranger itself. With the power to hide the identities of the simplest people, to cheat the human eye, deceive, disguise what once was. Yet is now no more.
I met a stranger in the park. Who pulled out a gun just as the sun was rising and put a bullet through my chest as the flowers began to open once more. He took off his jacket and under the hood, behind the disguise night had given him was 'the fit guy with the Labrador'. You see there is no personal with strangers, you never really know who they are. You don't know them through routine. You avoid them though routine. There is no difference between them in the light of day and the darkness of night it's all just the same in the end. It's just your choice as to whether you want to live in the light or fear the dark.
Innocence Is Only For Angels
She pulls the drawstrings tight around her neck
Letting dark long thick locks fall across her face
Like a shadow trying to conceal the very beauty that she is
Long sleeves never short,
Trousers never skirts.
Entrapped by the very garments she struggles to pull on in the morning.
The garments that suffocate her, ridding her of breath
As if to force the light out from her eyes
As if to make her body wither and whimper and wilt
Like a flower forever trapped in winter slowly dying.
She does this because they tell her to
They say it’s protection
All for affection
And of course it was never supposed to be subjection.
She knows they want to keep her sweet
Keep her so that she will always chase the butterflies
And never question how they fly
Keep her so that she believes in magic
Protect her innocence.
She is covered up as not to attract the likes of monsters
So that her walks home are never ambushed
So that on her prom night no one will see her
No one will want to steal her away to a hotel room
No one will try and take what is hers
What should always be hers.
But was never really hers.
They say she will grow up
They say that they will keep her safe
Just like they do now
Just like they do when they lock her doors and windows at night
No matter how hot and stuffy the room might make her
No matter how scared she may be of the dark they still keep on no lights
For if there was light god forbid if someone were to find her
She does not exist
For ‘safety’s’ sake she is invisible.
She will never marry
She knows this now
She must be kept to herself
So that she will never share her body with another
So that the world can never destroy her mind
Her youth
Her innocence.
This is what they said
They raised her this way
To keep her kind
To keep her pure
To keep her in the depths of youth.
They were positive and sure that she would never break
That she would always stay as they themselves shaped her to be
That she would never become.
Because what is it to become?
For progress leads to distress
And to transgress
And to minds that decay from too much stress
Nobody needs that
They. They don’t want her like that.
They could not see that she was wasting away
Dying and crying every night
And nor could she.
For she was never made known
To all that could potentially destroy her soul
She did not know of death
He was a fairytale living in a distant land
She knew not about her tears
Even though they made the rivers that she drowned in.
She did meet death eventually
They, the ones who told her how to live
Told her how to grow
They stayed by her side and told her
He- death
Was in her mind
Her beautiful innocent mind
She was going and leaving them
But they were holding her back with a rope of lies
They were adamant that she was innocent
So innocent
And that innocence could never die.
But she closed her eyes and heard the steady flat line.
Her whole entire life they had protected her from the only innocence that they knew
The innocence that lead to her death
There was the day on which she lost it
Her innocence When death claimed her for his own
For her life was innocent
And angels were never born to walk on the Earth.