Perception

Do you know the anguish of my soul?

Do you hear my heart cry in the midnight hour?

Take a razor to my scalp,

Remove the bone,

And pick through the crevices.

As it crumbles around you like a forgotten city

And encases you,

You will feel the warm electricity as it pulsates through your body.

Only then will your mind tell the tale of a foreboding, sleepless journey.

Icicles will drip from the caverns of your bloody heart.

When the numbness rushes over the palms of your hands,

Will you still stop this paper from becoming sodden with my guilt ridden soul?

Once your hands have become one with mine,

And you see the rage in my mind.

Your tears will become as stone,

Never again flowing down this dry river bed

Next time you speak,

Pray, tell me, have you felt this old soul’s heartache?

Alice's Not-So-Wonderful-Land

I wonder what life would be like

Without the birds madly chirping in my ear,

Without all the confusion.

Telling me how to think

Without the wind telling me how to breathe.

The roses are telling me to love a certain way,

But this is not my way.

These branches are bending my limbs and pointing me down a certain road.

This is the road of survival, yet not the road of fulfillment.

This is the road that always lacks

But is never uncertain.

The little bugs are eating up my flesh.

The bugs that remind me my eternity isn’t forevermore.

I wish these things would disappear.

My life wants to live. Yet

To survive it must die.

Where is the sunshine of hope for the future?

It has been lost in the sea of forgetfulness

And swallowed by my cave of darkness.

We find ways to survive, but never to truly live.

Let me be.

Let me remember the dreams of young

When anything was a possibility.

Let me live my life.

Not by the principle of society

But by my law written in the sands of carelessness.

My rose shall be plucked away.

Let me not love forever

But choose serendipity.

Let me not begrudgingly hike down the path of survival,

But to swim in the clear blue waters of my freedom.

Where I need not care if the rats encase me or if my rags end up tattered.

Let me be free.

Let me not hear a soul.

For I am all the soul I need.

Yet life laughs menacingly in my face.

For this is but a faint hope that fades with every breath I breathe.

These smiles will never be completely finished.

I have given my all to achieve a cold, dark place at the end of the street.

The midnight hour comes as I trudge down,

Money in one hand, man in the other.

The road of life has led me to another.

And it all.

Comes down.

To, soil?