Tonight

Stay with me, if only for one night.
Forget your worries and your cares
And just lie next to me.
Hold me in your arms and whisper to me;
Tell me your hopes and your dreams.
Tonight, this night,
Let's make it feel like forever.
Forget the clock and your problems.
Right here, right now,
It's only you and me and the moon.
Its light on our skin making us glow
Like two fireflies in an eternal embrace.

The ray of sunlight shining through the dirty window fell onto her desk and time stood still. Motes of dust swirled in the light, creating kaleidoscopic patterns. Her fingers crept across the table top toward the beam of warmth, searching for the edge between the cool wood and heated-up parchment. She lifted her hands and fluttered them in the light, ruining the intricate patterns and scattering dust everywhere.The light shone on her skin, illuminating the delicate hairs on her arms and turning them into golden threads. She rotated her hands slowly, fascinated by how the intensity of the beam exaggerated the wrinkles and lines on her hands. Her lifeline loomed like a crevasse, running parallel to her heart line. Nose inches away from her palms, she examined the rifts in her skin. Her breath stirred the dust into a frenzy.

*****

Infestation

The endless days and nights of tortured thoughts
Nightmares in waking and in sleep
A continuous whirlwind of manic anxiety
An infestation of fervent thought
A hostile take-over of an empty house
A pointless maneuver, done wrong.

Mock

I don't need pity
It's not real.
There's no appeal
In you pretending to care.
It's not what you feel
It's a fake emotion
You force onto your face
To make it look like
What I feel actually matters.



Photo Copyright Nicole Wiedig

Gone

Hide and seek

Where is the princess and her freak?



Photo Copyright Lizzie Morrison

Flow

All the words I wish your fingers could feel
All the times I've wished you could know
The mute despair
Lying stiff in my throat
Like broken teeth and viscous blood

I wish you could speak to my fear

I wish you could hold me
In your arms like oceans
And sooth what my weary muscles remember
All the bruises, all the sour hope
All the screams, all the shattered bones


Erase it all


Years wasted away on the shelf
Gathering dust and growing lackluster
The spark of life within me growing dark
As I sit and wait for the tide to come in
And you to enfold me in your arms like oceans



Photo Copyright Jessica Tremp

I cannot take it; I can't ignore
The desert just inside the door.

I want to go out now, please let me go
To places where the waters flow.



Photo Copyright Bente Agerup

Spin Spin

Inside my head a whirligig
Twirls with ballerina grace,
Its drunken joy unabated,
All sound and color and
Exquisitely vibrant dementia.



Photo copyright Mark Warnes

Waiting

Alone is not an adjective
But a State of Being.
A cage of impregnable force
With a might beyond belief
Harder than a diamond
And as impossible to imagine
As a better day on the horizon.
A fortress of solitude
With a plethora of eternally-empty rooms
Made-up and ready
But housing only me.



Photo Copyright Jamari Lior

Drawn

Sweet damnation.
Sin by association.
Yet something more
Keeps me coming back
To you.
Drawn,
Like a moth to a flame.
Self-destruction
Most sweet.



Photo copyright Jessica Tremp

Vegas

This city has stolen the wind from my wings
And promised me plenty of wonderful things.
Yet nothing to gain here,
and everything to lose
To the blitz and the glamor
and e're-flowing booze
The ring and the chimes of the metal machines.
The gluttonous nature of coin-eating fiends.

Wasteland

I have to go back to the land of the lost.
To places of hot air and never-seen frost.
Where tortured and beaten the mundane live lives,
And to the hot climate where treachery thrives.

To jealousy, envy, and festering rage;
To the back-stabbing dramas of this city's stage.
Los Angeles awaits me, a slumbering beast
My hopes and my dreams its delectable feast.

Broken Mirror

I can't bring myself to get up and to look
To stare in a mirror and to read like a book,
The troubles within me, the aches of my soul.
The sadness, the torture I've faced all alone.
I can't stand the sight of my hideous face.
The scars and regrets that are sprinkled and spaced
Across the expanse of my weather-worn skin.
Reflecting the turmoil without as within.


Photo copyright Cheryl Syverson