Two, there were
Aimlessly drifting from branch to branch
I sat watching – ardently
Weathering the crisp cold bite of the morning breeze
Longing for warmth, yet lingering
My heart grew quieter as they wandered closer
Longing for a friendship that I couldn’t posses
Challenging, the sheer disparity in our bodies and our forms
Intertwined solely by the space we formed
Wistfully to dance in glee with them as they did
Dancing to the song of their mind
Awake, I stood
Addiction exists in realms of it’s own
the walls of which are hard to perceive
each are one yet separated
to each their own variegated misery
some filled with flowers and cake
the rest with broken vases and promises
you can strive to empathize
but no matter how genuine your efforts
it fairly ever gets received
—
So, try. Try, instead
to see the person behind their own judgement
in ways that they have lost to see
and desperately struggling to
for if there is a chance
it only lies in extending the light
the light of hope to the one who have lost their way
They sat barefooted
Oblivious
Cigarette butt squeezed at the lip, barely
Cup of big gulp, clenched tightly
Biding time
One gamble for a pint
Catching up with the present
Stuck in the past
Losing at this unjust race
Space — didn’t matter
Neither did norm of any kind
What they found, theirs
Piece of cardboard, a bed
Corner of grass, land
Kind shade of an old tree, shelter.
Staring into the abyss
In a world of her own
I ask — “How’re you doing?”
She says — “Terrible.”
Sometimes
Sometimes, even as the sun shines draped with birds’ singsong
There is but a touch missing from inside the horizons of your soul
You’ve gone too deep in misery and it’s company
That you can’t really tell glitter from coal
Distinctly one thing is quite certain
Everything is an evenly painted gray
Things — they all feel the same.
No spark of red or blue or a tinge of yellow
Careful now, you wouldn’t want to inadvertently stir your soul.
Sometimes, like those nightmares you wish you could shake loose
They just don’t seem to let go.
And then you find
That, with time
All you can do is stand firm — and smile
Bad or worse or gray or white
In that very moment of reveling in pithy misery
you light a match ever so silently
one that burns quietly yet fiercely