To some you are just a blip

A moment in time when you

Place yourself in

a world that you were not

Born in,

Exposed too,

Or explored.

But peacock feathers in your mane fools no one

It is only a matter of time…

Until you shake your lion’s mane and expose yourself

A world built by man will not satisfy the nature within.

If you have travelled and come back exactly the same then you never left.

Artifacts from an altered state, jumbled memories, a few sharp pangs of emotional flashbacks. A peculiar creature that has shifting memories, enthusiasm but slowed movement, a sense for the moment and a complete loss at the same time. The hallucinating mimic shifting through form and places.

Peek inside a mind, in a life, in a dream, in something, anything that makes you feel like someone knows what you feel like. Is this validation only sought out by those that have been damaged or is this part of our makeup.

I don't know if I can do it. The future feels insurmountable, a dreadful, dark emptiness that pushes me back. The only way I move forward is because time refuses to stop. I try to paint the darkness with hope of a destination, but it is flimsy and melts in the face of the approaching contorting chaos. Giving myself up to the mercy of circumstance and relinquishing control of my life seems to be a cheap and foolish escape. I constantly fight against a future that I project into a void, and I always will, fuck you universe this is mine!

If you forget enough of yourself you can transform into anything, a personality as fluid as water. If reality becomes as detached as a dream, how do you remain grounded? Do you just pass through time and places becoming your surroundings? The sum of where you are.

Chasing the giddy high of approval by proxy of success you become the actor on the stage, a stage you still feel like you don't belong on, in a play that has no ending or beginning, like trying to figure out how you arrived in a scene of a dream. You are not the leading actor but a supporting role, however you were never given the script, so you hide in the background, only responding when prompted, making up your script as you go, waiting for the crowd to realize you do not know what you are doing. Suffering through the other actors' frustration while they perform without fault. A fraud waiting to be exposed under the lights of a stage.

A linear thought ruptures into threads that splinter into frayed chaos as entropy only increases the longer it persists. Emotional guardrails flare up only fanning the flames of catastrophic incoherence fuelled by anxiety, shame, and fear. You attempt to speak through the unspooled yarn of your mind, hoping that clarity will find you just in time to stitch the remaining sentence together. The dizziness turns to blankness, where did my thoughts go, how can I be muted and tortured by this unrelenting mind?

Slender beauty shimmers in an oasis, something that is a borderline reality and a dream that you desire like survival, yet still it remains unreachable, a means to make it through another day. Does your existence circle a dream? A dream can keep you warm at night for years until you see the dream in reality, after that the dream is no longer enough to keep you warm.

To be there and be paper thin, as if the moments pass through you, a ghost among a crowd. Never engaged, but an observer behind a delicate veil, only ruined by someone who reaches past it, if only someone would... Not even your weak character could resist, pathetic in your acceptance. You know you could reach out but that is just as terrifying. God damn the small shadow you exist within. Was this your actual sacrifice or something you just pretended you traded for who you are?

Thrashing bodies, pounding bass, excess of every kind, sweat and alcohol, disoriented destination, all trying to find what they know is primal but lost. Moving in unison to distorted voices and playful sounds. Destruction of consumerist possessions in blind ambition to unlock the door and find just one soul on the other side. Behaviour that makes no sense, random firing of neurons, trying to awaken the raw unjustified actions in the dark between strobing lights. You cannot swipe in real life, but God we are trying again.

Set yourself up for hurt

Play a game you know you will lose

Carry a daydream behind the scenes

An unattainable invisible self proclaimed fate

Feel the warning signs

Seeking validations your delirium exists

Over thinking tiny details

Become what you think they want

Trip over your own feelings

Your pain instead of being supportive

Feeling threatened by others

Speak through gritted teeth

Lip service to a real bond

Wait for the hammer to drop

Strike first, end it early

Minimise the damage

Hurt yourself, hurt them, reside in pain

Balled on the shower floor

Warm water hiding tears

Whisky in hand

Silent screams

Hail curses upon yourself

Selfish sobs reserved for the self hated

Hurt yourself as much as you hate yourself

So close to one step too far

Justify it is all for the best

Silence brings back loneliness

Find yourself alone again

Longing remains in your soul

Torture yourself and try to go back

Pleading in the form of beautiful words

Insecurities wrapped in apologies

Exposing yourself as a punching bag

Worthy of inflicted wrath

Hoping for pity, guilt or rage

Drenched in desperate shame

Promise it won't be the same

Set yourself up for hurt

Play a game you know you will lose

I have awakened from a deep slumber. From a place where all the walls are grey, and time slows. Dulled emotions and suffocating emptiness have glazed my eyes over too long.

A spark has started, bright, yellow, orange and red. Intensity and colour flood back. A surge of feelings, forgotten and almost alien, yet somehow, I know they define me. The chemical blinders removed.

Thunderous waves obliterate stagnant landscapes void of life. Sensations of old memory come back like walking into a familiar room that has avoided you for years. How was the door handle out of reach for so long?

Was I hibernating or sleepwalking? Either way a heavy sense of time lost or a lack of existence like a partial death weighs heavy somewhere inside, on the soul.

Stars scattered across the black canopy of the earth.

Each with the lure of a siren.

The streak of a shooting star catches your eye.

It burns bright, only for a moment.

As you return to the city the stars become harder to see.

The lights of the city blind you from all but the brightest stars.

Time passes in a blur of repetition.

You no longer look up to the sky.

Every now and again a glimmer hints to a feeling you are missing something.

A night, a chance encounter, unexpected words, an authentic moment.

And once again you can see the stars.

Starting from scratch becomes part of the cycle for those with short memories. A ritual repeated so many times it feels as natural as the change of the season. The feeling of losing part of yourself each time remains and grows. A distance exists from where you are to where you were, but you are no longer sure where you were, or who you are and who you were. Memory bleeds into fiction, self-justification, or worse reality. Could these be dreams? Are dreams memories also? Have I become a self-fulfilling story or am I constantly moving the target? You take yourself back to places you once knew. Places you have only visited in your dreams for years, in twisted and disjointed lucid landscapes that make as much sense as a map drawn by Picaso. These places feel so small, like you step over all of it, nothing but a footnote. How far have you let this world stretch and push you? Was it the world or was it my own unnatural ambition, driven by invisible demons, persisted by the inability to stop, because how could you ever justify the horror of the self-inflicted damage to escape? Perhaps this is the measurement of how many times you have performed your ritual, that you no longer feel like the physical world you go back to find yourself in no longer seems real. One day, likely not too soon, will also only persist in my dreams, added to the whirlpool of my degenerating identity. My dreams blend the small pieces I still hold onto, and sometimes I don’t want to leave my dreams, because it is the only place I am myself again, back in a handful of small moments I am lucky to keep.

A familiar step in a well worn path that runs in a loop. There is no start or end. You may pretend to gaze in a different direction while your feet continue on. You might tell yourself this is a different path, one you now have control over, that it is carefully placed, yet you continue on. You are no longer surprised when the same things occur, it is almost reassuring that you know how to react. You mutter under your breath, I won’t pass way again, yet you continue on. How do you step off a path that has worn itself into a trench you cannot climb out of?

Suffocating loneliness. Gasping. Reaching. Clawing. Brings on only more loneliness. Pretend you can breathe, while your body spasms, hide the pain, just a little longer, maybe soon the act will pay off. Death’s chalky cold hands scratch at your soul, longing to eclipse the cure… just that one, unbelievably rare, almost mystic, person that you know must exist. Existence riding on the false sense of hope that is invented out of necessity, projected on every dimly possible connection. Just keep saying it, this is the one, eventually you will be right, or the absence of sunlight will uncontrollably drown you in the darkest depths of space beyond escape. Forever chased by a past forgotten, the glimmers of ghosts created from words unsaid, fumbles in the moment, frustrated timing maligned, and coincidence mixed with the will of the universe. You know the moments, a spark, when space folds, time moves differently, the colors and lights are crisp, the sense that you have been here before and it feels like home. Those precious moments that you know mean something but are often drenched in the feeling that you are an actor on a stage that has no show. Haunted by the thing that is supposed to bring you to life. And now you try to take another breath.