Trapped

- an animal in a cage cannot move a fraction because the door is locked and the only way out is through the bars, which are inches apart and that is why animals must be small, miniscule, tiny enough to slip through and away and escape -

Dissatisfaction

I wish I had the fking guts to tell you how much it hurts

It is when I feel the most that I must become stone. That I must harden myself into an impassable, inanimate object that ceases to feel. Stones cannot break, so neither must I. I must change into a crystallised, solidified form that does not ebb with the warmth of emotion like hot blood flowing through veins. I am tasting the bitterness, the black coffee dregs that last indefinitely on your tongue. The pain lingers, tantalisingly slow and delicate like a ballerina dancing in a music box. You draped the noose around my neck and pulled it tight. Now I cannot breathe.

I suffocate.

A happy face is a clown mask with a fake smile pulled up to the ears. Stretched, like the twisting of skin. But beneath the mask everything is charred; black; burned ashes. What is this monster doing inside me? Disguised as a teddy bear but hiding the evil hands, the haunting voice, the figure with the knife.

Fk everyone

I must be perfect and then some

An Impossible Possibility

I stopped wondering for many days after that night I touched your face and your words left a burning sear on my heart. I hated you for a long time after that because I was so angry at the self-sacrifice and depth with which I gave myself to you and your resulting indifference. My heart was stifled because I silenced its anguished cries, and I became hardened stone.

But now each time I look at you I can see again the unsure smile, the tentative questioning of what is going on in my head. Every time I see her a thought runs through my mind: of the warmth you feel when you put your arm around her waist, your eyes closed as you smell the shampoo in her hair, the quiet conversations you have with your gazes as you sit in silence in your car.

I wonder if I could ever be her. If we could have the same intimacy I longed for, once in the past. I don't wish for it any longer because I know what you are like now, but I can't help but wonder about the sweetness and goodness I saw; whether it could be prolonged and sustained; whether I could ever learn to give myself to you again.

I shut myself up when you are around because it's still painful sometimes to know we will never sit together and love each other and be one. I wonder what it'd be like to reach out and touch the dimple in your cheek, smooth the crease on your forehead when you are concentrating, close your light brown eyes shut with my fingers and feel your hands pressing my ribcage. I wonder what it would be like if we grew together as friends, and shared worries and hopes and fears straight and raw from the heart; not as we do now - exchanging strained and polite hellos and composed faces; and all I am thinking of when I see the back of your head on the stairs is "Are you wondering what my hair would feel like under your fingers? How my voice would sound like on the telephone? Whether I look beautiful when I sleep?"

I wish I could open your heart and read it like a book, ( ). I know you have a million things waiting to be said.

Stop and look at the little girl lost in the crowd. Forehead wrinkled like a piece of crumpled paper: you can smooth out the creases but they will never be erased. Shoulders slumped forward, lips pulled down with the weight of being alive. Take in her clenched fists, knuckles turned white with anger and fear. Hate. Do you see into her heart, see the scum coating her beating pulse, the hands of her life-clock encrusted with the thick strangling cords that are growing around her spine, tighter and tighter and pulling taut -

- until she is bent backwards like a nutshell cracked open, bones breaking with the burden of expectation. It is not worry about the colour of her dress or the ice cream stain on her cheek that plagues her, but of the remote possibility that in this crowd she has lost herself, her tiny footsteps becoming ever more silent as she ceases to be visible to passers-by. Always smiling, always pleasing; but if you only knew that each curtsy masked a dance of anger waiting to be performed, you would realise that behind the child's mask there is a monster who is feeding on obsessions and impossibilities. Behind this facade of laughter and complacency the little girl is dying. Watch the veins turn blue with cold as the blood ebbs away from the skin, backtracking right to her beating heart, as her fingers fold in on themselves and she is bent over like a boomerang. Watch the writing on her skin slowly disppear. Watch her head turn sideways until her profile is silhoutted against the glaring red skirt of a woman behind her, and then watch as she enfolds into a thin line.

Stop and look at the little girl lost in the crowd. Stop and look at me.

Is there so much that this heart can contain? A burden to bear, not understanding where or what or why one feels such. When I lift my face I feel no remorse nor fear, when I bow I am lost and alone. If the body bends back and away, the soul ceases to pray. A flicker, a thought, a passing moment. Fleetingly precious and incomprehensible, but I no longer felt it. The wind in my hair is a long, enduring slap to my face. This ache, right here; here, is throbbing. Overcast clouds on a grey day, on the brink of rain, a downpour, an inundation of failure. I am a failure. Put me in a box and tie me up with a ribbon. I am the worst present you will ever receive. These claws scratch at my eyeballs and I am knotted sideways, hands under legs over head. A blanket on a bed is not a crib, a smothering pillow is a coffin. Lay a black rose on my breast. My mouth curling upwards in a smile is an upside-down frown. Peel off this mask from my face, bind me with ice. Burn my heart so it freezes, so I wake up and realise this is not a dream, and life is ending. Open again, the closed door, the barred path. Let me walk it. I want to leave footsteps, and I want to dance with You again. Wipe this droplet from my eyelash; it sits too comfortably there. I am a baby, but I have seen too much of the world.