The shadows dance up the walls to the pound of the drums, taller each day
They reign
I don't believe what I was taught, closed eyes, chin to the sky won't keep them away
They stay
There's no guarantees, but there is gravity, so if you hold onto nothing
You'll fall
Grasp at something to believe, some reason to smile in the dark
You'll find
That the future hopefully isn't quite as far away as you thought

And the shadows will go back to lying in the alley, where they belong

At the edge of a flower field, a girl hangs on the white picket fence that
separates her from the other side
She rests her chin in her hand, and watches
As shadows are summoned and twisted to shape
Anxiously searching for the silhouette
Of the boy who walks fearlessly among them

She doesn't know him per se
But she can't help feeling the fear he seems to not

He is the boy who breeds the shadows
And he must have some secret to controlling the dark that she does not know
Is it the song? she wonders
That he plays out night after night, note for note?

Because she has always know the dark to have teeth
And surely anyone who spends so much time with shadows
is bound to be bit

It's wishful thinking
to assume any stance of control
Yet that is what the boy who breeds shadows has done

She strains her eyes into the twilight of the other side
And her shoulders sag in relief as his outline comes into sight

How does he do this, night after night? she marvels

The sunlight gets brighter behind her, so bright it blinds her from inside and turns her side of the fence into a stage, in which the curtain is up and the show must go on.

I know, I know, I have a job to do. I'm coming, she sighs.

Bye, she whispers over the fence to the boy who can't hear her and the shadows that  swallow up the space between them.

She picks up her smile and turns to put on her performance, but her mind is still with the boy who breeds shadows.

*How does he do it?

Feel his pain so strongly
That for a fleeting moment
You want to go jump off a bridge
It doesn't get any easier

Death tends to speak sweeter words than Life
Only twice today did I cave and listen

I cannot cry for myself, but I will cry for you

It seems to run it's softness through your hair
Like I want to do
The closeness to how it dribbles onto your face
And the smooth as it looks like tears
The rivers of it down your shoulders and catches the slopes of your neck
How I love how it pools on your chest
And it the water loves to kiss you how I want to
In showers of rain

we have closed conversations and then forget everything that we said
words we hide and store away, in the back of our heads
that none of this never, ever happened
but we know the truth behind these masks
and the desire to feel that it was entirely real, even if it was only that moment