Not All There

Shut my eyes

Pretend I don't exist.

The silence can hide me,

TV static

White noise

A broken computer whirs in the back of my mind

I've smashed everything, the only thing left is myself.

I exist only in the noise,

Only in the words I say, write, think,

If no one reads them

I'm not here.

I'm not here.

I'm not all here, at least.

I live in the fragments of memories,

Brittle laughter and 

Empty conversations

That meant something at the time,

But have been replayed so much

They've spoiled.

Dyed hair, piercings,

It's not me,

Maybe it could be.

Black nails, combat boots,

It's not me,

But maybe it will have to be.

I'll dye my hair and dye my mind

Until everything has dyed, died away,

And I'll exist again,

In everyone else's eyes.

I'll become what you want me to be

And that will have to do

Because I'm nothing,

Nothing if not a box for whatever you fill me with,

Music and TV shows and clothes,

And I'll remember it all for you,

I'll keep it here until you need it,

And when you leave

So will I.

I don't know where I go,

I just stop.

I don't exist

Except through this.

I'm words on a screen.

The computer whirs in the back of my mind.

Stagnant waters,

Visited by flies that drone in my ears.

A little room, 

Damp and cold.

The naughty step,

All grown up.

I hide there.

My bedroom's a battlefield,

And we mimic our surroundings,

Or our surroundings mimic us.

I mimic,

I'm nothing without something to copy.

My mind's a battlefield,

Two sides caught in a camera flash

Can't take sides, just watch.

Wait and see which side will win,

Win the rights to what I do during the day;

And I see them both,  

Glaring into the bathroom mirror

At midnight.

I'm what you've made me,

And without you 

I'm nothing.

Five White Flowers

I just found this, and I don't remember writing it, but I felt like sharing it.

Under monuments of stone,
Lie a thousand memories,
A thousand tears shed,
Made immortal,
With words engraved,
Etched in blood, for money- no compassion,
But still worshipped.

Five white flowers lie
On the grass, petals fresh and crisp.
No one visits the grave
By the side of the road.
The grave of Unknown Car Crash Victim,
With just a small wooden cross,
And a laminated police tag.

No flowers lie on the grass,
Just weeds, over blood-stained memories,
Soon to the forgotten.
As the wooden cross rots and the cars go by,
Unseeing and uncaring,
The odd sad smile,
Or sympathetic shrug.
Roadkill.

Halfway Between

Next Saturday is my nana's birthday, and my mum asked me to write something for her. This is what I came up with.

The place I’m going to tell you about is hardly even real, but it exists alright. It’s the land between sleeping and waking, between life and death, between night and dawn. Sometimes, you might just glimpse it, when your eyes are half closed, or when the first rays of sunlight filter through the cracks in your curtains, but you never really see it fully. It's the place you go when you're still half dreaming; the things that live there are the figures you see out of the corner of your eye, when you tell yourself you’re being silly, nothing's really there, but they are there, they are real.

It’s a dangerous world, if you don’t know how to navigate it. The creatures that lurk will taunt you, mock you until you give up and crack. Time doesn’t work there, the seconds, minutes, hours melt into each other and twist into a spiral, so you don’t know how long you’ve been there. The things that live there- nameless, faceless- trap you, they won’t let you out unless you can figure out how they work. I could tell you the answer, if you’d like, it’s not as hard as it sounds. But I’ll save that for later.

That world was created by accident. A semi-real place, one dimensional but as full and vast as any, that you can’t even see, let alone visit… consciously. It was never meant to happen. Something went wrong. And now it can’t be undone.

It isn’t entirely bad, of course. The creatures don’t mean any harm, they’re just a little…afraid. Confused. If you can get them to let you out, then you have the option to stay, and then the taunts will stop and they’ll show you things- your dreams that you never realised, the way out of your nightmares, the parts of your mind that you never knew you had. Then, you can thank them and be on your way. Though, you’ll have to do it all again the next time. Once you leave, it’s locked again, and you’ve forgotten almost everything…just a few whispers remain…but you’ll always know you’ve been.

Maybe I won’t tell you the secret, how to get them to let you out. Maybe it only works if you figure it out yourself. Maybe it’s best that way.

I'll Die Quoting Nirvana

I'm a cheerful teenager

Let's toast the new year with a swig of arsenic.

A bullet to the brain will do the trick.

So will a good old fashioned head-on-a-railway-track.

Or there's the Golden Gate Bridge.

Beachy Head.

Slitting your wrists would be a bit messy, 

And a noose can snap,

And either way someone's got to find the body.

Drowning looks kind of miserable,

But there'd be nothing there to find.

Because,

Why would it matter?

One

Tiny

Insignificant

Person.

Gone.

I could set my house on fire,

When my family's out of course.

But my neighbours might smell the petrol smoke.

"Teenagers

Dropping like flies

The Suicide Epidemic!"

I wonder why...

Can't possibly be...

Oh, but no, surely not...

So let's all write our suicide notes,

Tape them to the door,

And our families will find those two words:

"Fuck. You."

And they'll damn us to hell for daring to swear in this house,

But it doesn't matter

'Cause we'd be going there anyway,

Right?

No.

And I'll die quoting Nirvana:

"Daddy's little girl ain't a girl no more"

Because I'm a walking stereotype.

It would be the last 

Full stop

I'd ever write.

Language

Words are like music. 


In music, as in writing, you have melodies- you have bars (sentences) that soar and swoop. String together bars and you have songs (stories, poems). Music tells stories, using sounds; you have long notes and short notes, high and low, loud and quiet, staccato or soft and gentle. You have all of these in words; you have sharp fricatives,   smooth vowels and so much more. You can hear a language that you don't understand a word of, but just the sounds of the words and the voice of the speaker tell you everything the speaker is saying. 


There is little that gives me greater joy than writing, then reading aloud the words I have written, as long as it turned out the way I hoped; the feeling of words flowing, the tongue hitting the top of my mouth and my teeth and producing sounds that express far more than just the words on a page, which express so much already. The natural way words are said, shouted, whispered, that tell you so much; the way you need no musical talent to produce something musical and lyrical and beautiful. 


So much is hidden behind the black and white shapes on a page. There's always so much more underneath the ink that you can find simply by reading, not just seeing but hearing the words too; hearing the way the sounds of the words can bring about feelings that the meanings alone can only tell you about. A great poet uses rhyme and rhythm, alliteration and stanzas, isn't confined by them. A great poet takes a feeling, an idea, a simple observation, and expresses it in a form that's beautiful and amazing. When you can read a story and see all of it, imagine the characters and the setting in such detail that you finish the book almost believing you are that character, and it makes you see the world differently- that's a sign of great writing.


Words are music. With words you can build empires of stories. You can both enlighten and conceal, you can provoke any emotion you wish. With words you can express anything you like, and understand the minds of any other person. Words are beautiful and wonderful and are as much a force to be harnessed as they are a tool, and they are there for anyone to use and enjoy.

Doll

I'm never good at titles, so do tell me if you can think of something better!
This is something I wrote for a poetry competition that my aunt has decided I should enter, which is in June. It's very rare that I show my poems to my family, so this was written very carefully as something that I could.

The eyes were blue,
Tired, worn,
Dead, dull,
But bright against the faded skin
Of the head, which lay
A foot from the plastic neck.
The red plaid dress,
Torn, burnt,
Threads tangled, knotted
In the matted polyester hair.

She likes to think she can see sadness
In the eyes of the doll,
But she's imagining it,
Like the she's imagining
The desperate way the fingers
Seem to grasp at the fabric of the dress,
And the flicker of a smile
On the cracked painted lips.

She looks at the doll,
And sees the fire that destroyed
Her childhood;
The memories of
A six year old girl
And the doll in the red dress-
Birthday present turned best friend-
As she watched it all burn,
The smell of acid heavy in the air.

She picks up the doll
(the head, the body, and the broken limbs),
And cradles it to her,
Smelling the acid that lingers on the clothes,
Whispering into the filthy hair,
Stroking the burnt face,
And smoothing down the creases
In what was once a little red dress.

Behind These Walls

Hiding, behind walls of rhyme,
Chaotic daydreams kept in time,
Iambic pentameter, layors of metaphor,
Protecting, concealing your
Hopes dreams and fears.


Write all your secrets, for no one will hear,
If you're singing them out, loud and clear.


You can drown your sorrows in a drink,
Made of poetry; of sonnets and haikus and ink.
You can build up walls of imagery,
With bricks made of soliloquys,
And within the walls, a box, locked,
The key; a fountain pen.


And within the box,
A notebook,
And within the book,
A poem.
And within the poem,
Where only you will know to look,
Are the words you've been silently shouting.