It was not a quiet agony
I did not sit in silent tears
and let them wash away sorrow
dulling and quenching hurt;
It was burning castles,
crumbling ruins and flaming ghosts
screeching and wailing
reapers rioting amongst hellfire
Cerberus howling and snarling
ripping at the remains of my bruised body
My pain was damnation
It was the Earth ravaged by fire
and the sea, black with oil
I will not be sated

Anguish is a wildfire
and mine will engulf the world

Lady I don’t know barges into my stall at the nightclub toilets
She looks at me with a grim smile that’s trying to split her face in two
Before I can stumble she grabs my arm, looks at me with eyes
Rolling and rioting inside their sockets and says
Don’t forget
With her nodding frantically I ask what I am forgetting
And she shakes me and points at the neon fluorescent humming on the ceiling
The sun she says she says the SUN we have forgotten it
I give her my palms and say lady I don’t know you
She is already laughing
It’s a laugh that sounds like the splintering of bones
Like dragging a sharp knife across a rotting ribcage
A laugh you know is a precursor to wild and empty weeping
The light flickers and I notice that it does look like the sun
A bit, from this angle, from where my head is pressed under the heavy weight
Of the whites of the lady’s eyes
Another stall door opens, whispering across the ground and taking her smoke-thin body with it
But all I see is the sun, flickering like the beating of wings and I want to touch it so bad that I am burning
Truly burning, ignited on the promise of remembrance
There is a name I have forgotten and I know I will hold it again if only my fingers could stretch to touch the light
The girl that exited the stall puts her arm on my shoulder to move me away from the sink
And I fall into wakefulness, coughing and spluttering ash all over my bed
I see I have left a single candle burning by accident
There are dead moths everywhere

A tire swing hangs from a tree
a girl with white teeth is smiling
at the warm chocolate eyes
belonging to the ******* the branch above
the leaves are falling around them both
and turning to gold in their passing
dreams are had inside the treehouse
hands held and secret kisses kept
within a tiny wooden world
the sun is looking fondly on them
and so turns to keep away the chill
that is already darkening the sky
summer dreaming has yielded to winter’s reality
and the girls know this,
they know that when the cold comes
the treehouse will fall apart, made brittle by the ice
but first
Autumn.
If they cannot have the winter, they can at least
have this moment
In the twilight making magic of them
they can share a blanket
and a hope
and a world
and a dream
and some more kisses.

There is a wild beast
Living in my ribcage
I feel her pacing the length of it
Until twilight
When her rage simmers
And I hear the soft whimpers
Of a trapped thing
I feed her scraps of my soul
Small morsels; but enough
This carnivorous queen
All tender gentleness in the night,
Restless and terrifying come dawn
When the day comes
And she is released from my bones
Cower, Eve's children
For she will devour the sun
And the darkness
And all else that remains.

I want to stay off school and write
until my fingers are ******
I want to escape the combustion
in the halls, in the classrooms
suffocating me
learning the same things
the same meaning
'get all A's or your life is over'
pressure, pressure, pressure
what's the point?
in 100 years from now
when the world is (most likely)
a polluted, burnt out cinder
will it really matter
who I was
what I did
If I didn't do my homework?
Why should I care
I'll probably end up in a coffin
before I can make anything of myself anyway
I want to write.

I should have known how
You would hurt me
For you are sculpted
Like a knife

I ask him why he likes me so much
He smiles, and says 'you are so delicate,
Like baby birds' hollow bones'
Sugar sweet words, overripe
What I hear him say is:
'I have never loved anything I did not want to destroy'
And he does
Oh he does