she tumbled from sleep into
the cold dim basement of reality
clutching

a shiny little sliver
of the dream she'd had,
the one where she decided that

she didn't want to be like
everyone else; where she was

the only one

who could stand Different
against a colourful sky and be
beautiful

(but l.i.f.e. doesn't work that way.)

i've carved a place for the memory of you
in the hollowness of a scar-lined heart,
the empty-aching space you once filled.

you're not the same in
remembrance
as in life. here alive in only my mind

you're all sharp edges, cutting at me
tearing apart
and it hurts so much just
to remember.
the light bulb on my ceiling

burned out
a week ago, and i'm still
groping at the wall fumbling with the switch when it won't
turn on. so in darkness i go stumbling
across the floor

sliding to a
fall on a black-and-white photo of you.
pieces of you, pieces
of yesterday, still lying restless

all around me.

We’re lying in the silence where
revolutions wax and wane like the
autumn lunar cycle, eloquently circular and

fingernail thin, like our
assurances have grown. Sort through
all this mess but isn't every
questioner just a little
afraid of getting to the bottom of
everything and finding

nothing there, perhaps
not even emptiness, in all its
shape-shifting spirit forms.
So change is inevitable,
and maybe immutability is
as well, because there could be
any number of unspokens in this

transitory zone. Lift your head into
the wind and wake up now, there are
so many vivid hues and faded greys to
breathe in and out before you leave,
so many roads of broken glass to
travel down. We need to smile sometimes

even when it’s our secret that we’re still so
raw and numb. And your smile looks
so real tonight, even if

nothing else is anymore. So now I
know, there isn’t any revolution that wants
me
to be a part of it,
but maybe there’s an uprising, or a river
to cross,

or a silvery moon with an ascending
ladder to swing from into the dark
and unknown. So write this in the
starlight
in whatever ink you can find
or create,
because in the end if anything
matters it isn’t what lasts but what

we make of what never will.

I ride the bus to school through tree-lined
suburban streets while in another country
people are beaten tortured raped and killed.

The sky outside the steel-framed bug-smeared
window arcs grey and dirty marred by a
thousand and one angular high-rise buildings

and softer-formed wispy contrails that I
used to think looked so lovely against the
azure heavens, until my father told me they just
meant more

co2 that our over-taxed planet
can no longer handle.
I also used to adore the sound
of a busy highway in the early
morning with vehicles whispering an
oddly melodic drone against the asphalt,

but now
I can hardly ride this bus without
thinking of the pollution spewing from the
tailpipe.
So I guess

if childhood means thinking simple
little things to be beautiful
then growing up means learning
to see that beauty as
just more ugliness
in an ugly,
faded,
fragmented
world,

or forgetting the beauty
altogether.

Like a little girl,
I shout at steep canyon
walls, but

this time
only hear echoes
of who I used to be.
She was right,

I could be anyone.
I don’t know quite
what I was expecting,
back when I was so
busy trying to grow up

too fast, but I don’t think
it was this.