Rhapsody, Rhetoric and Reverie: an anthology of dictionary poems and poetic prose

aleatory adjective \ ale·a·to·ry \ ˈā-lē-ə-ˌtȯr-ē \ depending on an uncertain event or contingency as to both profit and loss relating to luck and especially to bad luck we pulled wishbones anyway, found hope in fallen eyelashes, secrets in shooting stars; we picked up forgotten pennies, often threw them into fountains as if emptying our pockets would leave behind a space the right shape and size for what we wanted be filled with it doesn't take unfulfilled wishes to figure it out: it's all a throw of the dice, it's all one marble picked whilst blindfolded from a jar, a spinning roulette wheel; it's all butterfly-chaos- randomness that we tried to find meaning within to make sense of injustice and sudden losses, meaningless triumphs. Even if there's a plan, there's no way of meddling with it. life is not a dress rehearsal, but it is an improvisation

bellicose adjective \ bel·li·cose \ ˈbe-li-ˌkōs \ favoring or inclined to start quarrels or wars There was a girl who was told to learn self-love. When she eventually learnt to love herself, she did it so fiercely, it plunged a dagger into the heart with which she'd loved and killed her humanity. Or else she did it with such wretchedness, it killed her. Self-love is a dangerous game, it's not something to aim for. But acts of love are absolved without question in the same way as acts of warcountless deaths, destruction, unquantifiable despair in the ruins when it ends, if it ends, for like love, it is part of being human. Being made of heartbreak and heartache, offence, defence. Devoted to the battlefield. When words of love are spoken, they seep from a wound in a language of blood.

Conquest wonders if power part of his being and irremovable? He is the one who will subjugate this earth before his siblings grab at his bone-made crown that carries the scent of tragedy, trying to follow in his footsteps. The crown sits on his brow, and when he touches it Conquest's fingernails snag on tresses of his hair. He counts casualies like he is counting loose coins. War is one who thrives on power, but it's not part of her being, not the way violence is. Conquest waits for her to kick at his heels as they make their journey past rotting church steeples, desolate towns, rundown hotels on the roadside. War pursues power relentlsesly, and her hunger is kaleidoscopic, monstrous. She takes and takes, revolving around Conquest and his own takings like a carousel spun by the cycle of victory and failure, loss and victory.

The echoes of past fights, the pursuit of new ones to declare- they rattle in the confines of his skull. War does not rattle, does not shake, and knows no confines.

chimera noun \ chi·me·ra \ kī-ˈmir-ə , kə- \ an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts an illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially : an unrealizable dream an individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic constitution Maybe it just lost its charm, bad dreams, bones and riots; everything so barbaric. I looked into its eyes and saw something bigger and more ancient than the sea, emptier than the sky, beyond the chorus of life- time, music, weather, words, grief, light, memory.

The mystery of a three-headed beast, bowing gently into the night. That great torrent of water to dark enough to fall asleep. It’s nothing and everything all at once, or an amalgamation of who knows what- caverous space, inherently messy feelings, forgeries and phantoms.

The walls thrum with the threat of what might break them. I wear this tension like a coat. They shall leave me alone with it sometime soon and I will stop trying to keep it together. Broken lightbulbs and shattered cups. It's a weight I can't carry for the fear of letting go. Imagination keeps the wheels turning, but everything is blurry, abraded, and I'm abandoned in a place I do not know whether I created for myself or is real and concrete, in an existence that will not reveal itself as more than a shadow or less than a life.

deleterious adjective / del·e·te·ri·ous \ ˌde-lə-ˈtir-ē-əs \ harmful often in a subtle or unexpected way a poem is often just a convoluted way of saying 'I love you' when you don't want to say it because you don't know if you mean it and a poem is a gesture and it's not a proclamation but it's not a lie until the recipient reads between your lines and they all become broken apart, broken promises, and it hurts so much more to know you have been cajoled, made a fool by words and rhetoric. an accusation on your next breath, tempting a violence that breeds delight you cannot handle but you wake the dragon, anyway. I will nip at the hand that feeds me, you say, so please, crumble me. This isn’t a test a love but of boundaries and power,how much of it you give me and what I can take from you, and you never saw me sharpen my teeth, did you?

Tailored to admire depravity and living to love the unlovable. “You’re cordially invited to a tea partyIn the company of cigarettes and solitude.”

Two ugly souls drunk on each other’s darkness / velvet fingers and razorblade eyes, the emulsion of blood mixed with tears and the trails of dripping mascara. Happiness comes at a cost. sure, but when you're making some mockery, someone else won't easily forget being victimised.

ethereal adjective \ ethe·re·al \ i-ˈthir-ē-əl \ of or relating to the regions beyond the earth lacking material substance : immaterial, intangible taste the stars dancing on your tongue / feel the cosmic dust tickling your throat / dip your toes into the cloud of particles hovering at your feet / planets circle around your ankles / gravity is relative / run your fingers through the inexhaustible space around you / hold the darkness in your palms / take time and make a fist around it / let the galactic tide wash over you multitudes of celestial bodies fit against your body like puzzle pieces / inhale / meteors clatter in your lungs and paint luminous streaks along your ribs / new-born stars bloom from the trails of ice and dirt / exhale / a globular cluster condenses just inches from your lips and whirls in interminable orbit / close your eyes and feel the solar flares kiss your lashes / let the spiraling nebula swallow you whole / constellations knot hair and deconstruct along your cheeks / the galaxy unfolds against your skin / this is nullibility You, the moon - or something like that - always out of reach, something I cannot grasp, desperate with my hands - the open flame, maybe? Taunting, bright, flickering. Or the undercurrent of the river?

Dragging me down, letting the water wrinkle my skin like every forgotten love letter crumpled up in a landfill somewhere. That which may as well never have existed. The fallen tree in the forest with nobody to hear it. Are you the secret, danger, superstiton, supernatural, defying explanation? Always whispering- but why? If I cannot see or touch you, observe or measure, why do I feel you here anyway, closer sometimes than my own heartbeat?

fissure noun \ fis¡sure \ ˈfi-shÉ™r \ a narrow opening or crack of considerable length and depth usually occurring from some breaking or parting a separation or disagreement in thought or viewpoint Maybe that is all I will ever be: fingers, unhinged, porcelain limbs connected by elastic string and sticky tape; my mind, unhinged just one link apart to be complete and move amid reality for the space between my feet and the solid earth, the skin of others that might have touched mine- a chasm of no scent, no sound, no light or dark. Maybe all I am or ever was is a collection of dead living things- synapses and chemical reactions that failed to serve their purpose; broken ribs and cerebral fluid flowing everywhere and nowhere all at once; earthquakes starting in between my bones. Maybe living is not living at all, just the space that exists between intention and action when all I was ever meant to be was a broken promise of a person.

Fissures set apart clouds and rock formations, but they are there among us too. The barriers that are erected for protection, secrecy, social anxieties or shame- once built, they require decades to be demolished. When someone is socially ostracised, it is registered in the brain in exactly the way that physical pain is processed. The chasms between us may never be easy to bridge, but we can call out across the ravine, just to show that whomever is on the other side and beyond reach is noticed, recognised.

gloaming noun \ gloam·ing \ ˈglō-miŋ \ period between sunset and full night: dusk The sunbeams that we’re streaking across the skies have been shattering blue like cracked pieces of stained glass. Cold air whispers through the slivers between trees and skyscrapers and makes the way for shadows to start spreading in dark caresses.

There is nothing like the taste of a distant memory, a forgotten spring twilight.

Night falls and warms the cool skies and in the elegiac velveteen air you find daydreams, but that can’t be right. Yet there they are aglow in your hands like clouds hiding sun. White winds of time will smooth out your scar tissue and wear down the nightmares into hazy afterthoughts.

What is the differene between memory and nightmare? Both leave scars behind in their wake. I am tar less afraid of nightmares than I am of the weathers we face each day. Dreams tranport you back in time and sometimess to the worst of them, the most frightening of all one's memories, but when morning breaks in sunbeams and skies coloured from cereulian to violet to perfectly white- the nightmares don't linger to appreciate the beauty in a morning.

harbinger noun \ har·bin·ger \ ˈhär-bən-jər \ something that foreshadows a future event : something that gives an anticipatory sign of what is to come one that initiates a major change : a person or thing that originates or helps open up a new activity, method, or technology Behind all of this is a new exhibit, revealing something yet to come. The shaking mirrors, the mounted butterfly wings, the vaunted works of art are elsewhere, high up in the vaulted ceiling where you can only catch a glimpse but enough to see something coming.

I’m smiled at by a stranger who watches as my face turns sour.

I don’t want to be here but we turn down the hallway into a series of new hallways; endless off-white walls hung with frames of crawling insects zombified behind glass cases. The end of these corridors can't bring us to anything good, but we walk towards it anyway because we only move forward, towards the unknown. But in my eyes, a scintilla is a promise and it doesn't feel like doom. In the ceiling, I see Albrecht Dürer’s famous hands and reach for them as though this vision is a cloud that I’m watching turn into a familiar, gentle shape.

illusion noun \ il·lu·sion \ i-ˈlü-zhən \ the state or fact of being intellectually deceived or misled a misleading image presented to the vision perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature There are days when I run and I feel like I’m chasing something, something larger than me, and there are days when I run and I feel like something is chasing me, something stronger than me, and I cannot tell if it is just another figment of my imagination engaged in battle with its own shadow enemies, or if it's something lodged in my brain to chew on it- a cold thing that will fool me into believing whatever it wants me to, or if it's real- either way, my gullibility is my weakness, and I'm tired of running from phantoms and predators and possibilities.

I’ve been thinking about you in all the wrong ways again. My lampshade hangs crooked and spills the light out all wrong. The birds don't sing at daybreak and I hear them crying instead, they migrate at an odd time of year. I heard your voice in my dreams yesterday, everything else in shades of grey. I don’t want to find meaning in this. I deny my nature. I draw a line between misguided ghosts and that which everybody else sees in full colour or just in black or white.

jejune adjective \ je¡june \ ji-ˈjĂźn \ naive reflections on life and art simplistic and juvenile: devoid of significance or interest perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature The thought unrequited love is often accompanied by they would love me if only they knew me. Why is this the go-to understanding of it? It was engraved in us from the start after all, intrinsic egocentrism- us being the the center of the universe. Everything to the left is to our left, everything ahead of us is ahead. Maybe part of growing up is growing out of what is innate and understanding that we may just not be enough, even if the world appears to revolve around us.

Drawing the sun in the left corner of your picture. drawing flowers in your notes, standing outside with your face toward the sun. a human sunflower.

Standing outside with your face toward the rain; nightlights shaped like suns and stars, planets and moons; living is laughter and rainbows made by sprinklers on lawns, balloons at birthdays, wind in your hair.

In my memories, we are still there watching TV reruns and holding our breath to make the hiccups go away, planning shopping excursions; girls with big dreams, big plans, but no preparation for what comes after girlhood. But in my memories, you are still by my side, grimacing after your first taste of vodka.

kismet noun \ kis· met\ /ˈkɪzmɛt/ \ a force that some people think controls what happens in the future, and is outside human control destiny ; fate If we were to learn the plan for our existence, to foresee all the paths we will take as we journey on; or if we could be told that someday our wishes will come true- hopes of marriage, personal aspirations, achievements that the future will present us with once we have arrived- would you want to know?

While reading about divination, I encountered a certain type called Orniscopy, which is a word for when one foretells their future by watching the behaviour of birds. There's one for nails that reflect rays of the sun, there's one for examining your shoulders, there's one for the colours of wines, interpreting laughter, dropping melted wax into water, plucking passages at random out of library books. If there is truth to any of this, I'm confident that I've gathered your lifetime in its entirety without even knowing. If I could collect your subsequent years by paying attention to the way you spread honey on your toast or the folds in your sleeves, would that make me wise, or just foolish? It seems that our lives have received enough attention without trying to think up ways to predict what is coming. With that knowledge, our lives would stretch out, billowing before us like a circus tent.

lament verb / la¡ment \ lÉ™-ˈment \ to express sorrow, mourning, or regret for often demonstratively to regret strongly Find it in a poem, an eulogy, a song or hymn.

In my grief I created a new language- the loss of you- and stood like a sacrifice in open fields and hoped that something felt how much I wanted you back, that my mourning looked like burnt trees still standing on breathing stumps, yet that this new language was terrible, and ruining and full of hope.

There are no instructions to guide us through grief and we know very little about what to do with it. People's words are clumsy, no memorial service will ever do justice to the deceased, and there is nothing to say or express that is correct. We make it up as we go along, tripping over ourselves like foolish clowns trying not to break cutlery, trying not to agonise about how such a small coffin can contain such an ebuillient and tremendou person, trying to remain articulate and hold it together because my family would expect some awful self-destructive action, and they don't know how wrong they are. What I regret most is that she was the one who died. It should always have been me.

metamorphosis noun \ meta·mor·pho·sis \ ˌme-tə-ˈmȯr-fə-səs \ a striking alteration in appearance, character, or circumstances change of physical form, structure, or substance especially by supernatural means How do i disappear? What’s it like to be desirable? I’ll just close my eyes and turn my head. pretend i’m not a part of this world. Something about the lines in his palms tells me i can trust him to hold my body When i am not myself. the clock is counting out my seconds. the phone rings. my heart pounds. I hold my breath. I do not belong anywhere. The only way I ever will is if I can change into, at the very least, something that seems to belong here.

The events of the last few months have triggered my own metamorphosis. I believe that it's a protective mechanism so that I can go on with my life without the constant struggles and panic that come with trauma. I have been changed in this way and will never change back. Yet plenty remains exactly as it was- my passions, my moody nature, my bad choice of boyfriends, my enduring anxiety and, of course, my written word. I cannot forget, but I have to forgive because if I did not, I would never smile again, and I plan to smile copiously as long as I have others to share in the laughter with.

neurosis

noun \ neu·ro·sis \ nu̇ -ˈrō-səs , nyu̇ - \

a mental and emotional disorder that affects only part of the personality, is accompanied by a less distorted perception of reality than in a psychosis, does not result in disturbance of the use of language, and is accompanied by various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances (such as visceral symptoms, anxieties, or phobias) How often do you split yourself open for others to see? When I dare to, they gape at the carnage instead of looking at the demolished bones and crystalline blood waiting for crimson petals, seeing everything but what I need them to.

There's violence in my lungs, always in the wind, taking fugitive breaths, using organs I’ve stolen just to survive. I’m all dried and peeled to the root, observe me disintegrating from within, pressing red flowers into my skin, making my marks with a mirrored edge but only to mend the cracks already chiseled into me. The scars last like scrapbook memories and reminders as dead stems twining through my marred kaleidoscope memory, a little too often, and each time a little more devastating.

Anorexia nervosa swallowed more than a decade of my life putting me in and out of hospital for months at a time. I one bit my nails, but that's no nervous habit compared to self-starvation. It wasn't compared to what came later also.

Restless days and sleepless nights. Bloodshed and scatterings of glass shards and the sanity you fear has been shredded, blown away on a gust of wind. The people who pass me by shoot me with their hateful looks (but that cannot be true) and then I hear their voices, their opinions and insults- that I'm ugly, that I'm just a sexual object, yet what terrifies me most is realising I've lost my mind entirely. Those voices taught me a great deal- my unconscious is a bonafide genius Machiavellian, but genius.

oneiric adjective \ onei·ric \ ō-ˈnī-rik \ of or relating to dreams The unique colours that are blinked away, the lace trim torn off the hemline of sleep.

The brain is a deep dark cave and when you are not aware and awake it pushes you headfirst into what you think this all means- what's left of the rooms, the echo, the shadow, a slow dizzying in my lungs and behind my brow. pretending imagination circling this dark drain of summer, I read once that dreams are either expressions of your fears or of your desires, but I think that's a little reductionist. Our brains need sleep in order to function correctly and only when we are asleep can the latent issues pr personal insecurities or attitudes, as the thought processes are constantly in our minds, just below the level of our awareness. I think when we sleep we confront that which we can't do during waking hours.

They may be things we are afraid to face, or the dream may be actually helping us buy allowing us to process the unconscious mind and face up to its concerns- and oddly it's almost as though dreams make metaphors out of your neuroses.

“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality”- Oliver Sacks

palimpsest noun \ pa·limp·sest \ ˈpa-ləm(p)-ˌsest , pə-ˈlim(p)- \ manuscript or paper that is erased and then written over

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something with usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface

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Dearest Mother and Father, whose outward mark will be discussed later With a heavy heart I write to you two actors and the chorus. Our task must be to gain insight to explain and outline my intentions to remain here to give it form and significance and bad-mouth the sea so too we must be careful not to think though often I wake with a sickly desire to start for home it seems well to anticipate one or two crucial points At the peak of my day I am determined to finish one character joined in conflict with another this thing I started the solitary hero facing his own destiny or playing out an inner drama of his own soul with the help of a friend I have made in this respect he enabled the plot to move Please don’t misunderstand me at once we meet an illuminating difficulty you are woven into every dream an essentially epic story made ready for the stage but you raised me strong and as it happens we are fairly well supplied with facts about the war I speak ill of the captain to curry favour an unprofitable situation, we are glad when the Queen arrives since there is a war to fight disorderly flight is honest misconception; alternatively a marathon to march in heavy armour though we may perhaps feel some doubt here I tap my helmet with my spear, squinting the reason why Aeschylus will have no message of victory for I fight for you both Darius’s ghost has something to say about this deafened by freedom’s bell ringing the chorus obviously says the right thing I hope the sound reaches you both when the arrival of the Messenger converts fear into frightful reality Until I return that is at least the way in which the Queen takes it this is all I write her final comment is ‘Not much comfort here for the parents of our soldiers!’

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i.e. intertextuality / The Wasteland / the phenomenon of family mealtimes / adolescence / the trajectory of development within the mind of a serial killer / custody battles / greenhouses / dog shows / a case study / a change in the zeitgeist / usurpation / abdication / mutiny / mythology / folie a deux / the memory

quotidian adjective \ quo·tid·i·an \ kwō-ˈti-dē-ən \ commonplace, ordinary, everyday occurence newspapers but not always with news, weather forecasts of winds but not always wildfires, traffic but not always on country roads, postmen visiting but not always when you'd want, showers running but not always steaming, insects but not always swarming, schooldays but not always in summers and springs, sea tides but not always bringing driftwood, calendars ticked but not always on the wall, alarm clocks but not always adhered to, trains leaving or arriving but not always on time, footsteps but not always going somewhere certain, consequences but not always with causes, birthdays but not always with celebrations, birds but not always with birdsong, speaking but not always with listening // victories but not always without losses, failures but not always without gains, nightfall but not always without clouded skies // steps forward and steps back // development and destruction // certainty and chaos // life and death // always change, always with consistency, never without more change, never without everyday change Parties once happened here. Now, nothing. The nights had become shadows that only spoke nonsense,and only the tail-end of a whisper remains to rattle between bookshelves and bathrooms,hinges on attic doors and paperweights.

Once there had been life there that left hand prints of galaxies,love notes and memos spelled out in starlight or Morse Code,

residuum noun \ re·sid·u·um \ ri-ˈzi-jə-wəm \ a thing that is left behind after a process

I wedged myself between the headboard and the wall of my thoughts for hours scribbling books and half-daydreaming and i remember thinking if i could cease to exist in this moment, what would they say at my funeral.

When all else around her fell to ruin, she sighed, "What a pity" and built a castle upon the decay, and structured a throne from nothing.

A collective breath-holding of ghosts.

Burnt homes, tangled lights in trees in a blink extinguished, hands full of what they held onto suddenly empty. The void in their absence feels heavier and more lowering now they are gone so chase the trapped animals, find an old radio and the stowaway moon because there's only so long we can pretend what circled the dark drain didn't get drawn in and that it will drift right back to us and how it was, how we left it, how we knew it before we knew we might someday lose it.

A headstone. An urn of ashes. A scattering of memories. A footprint. A scar.

solipsism noun \ so·lip·sism \ ˈsō-ləp-ˌsi-zəm , ˈsä- \ a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing

With this inconceivable bundle of tangled lifelines, I’ll unwind history.

Although the tapestry of time has a habit of weaving itself over and over again. And we have a bad habit of repeating past mistakes.

To imagine that you are really all that is left of the human race or living things in their entirety, it would require you to spend much time alone with your thoughts- that's quite terrifying. There is something tranquil about hearing rainfall on your window during the little hours. It makes me feel completely alone on the planet.

She didn't want to be alone. She didn't avoid people or keep herself away from her peers- friends, family, co-workers-- although these people had been long growing impatient because of this. All she wanted was to escape. She had her reasons, though she hadn't shared them and didn't imagine she'd ever muster the courage to share her secret. And she didn't know what the future would bring, if he had one. All she could contemplate right now was how to get through another hour, then another and another, and so on. Just to survive.

topography noun \ to·pog·ra·phy \ tə-ˈpä-grə-fē \ the art or practice of graphic delineation in detail usually on maps or charts of natural and man-made features of a place or region especially in a way to show their relative positions and elevations

the physical or natural features of an object or entity and their structural relationship This planet that we are all quite intent on destroying is actually hi astounding, like it's built onthatwhich dreams are made, and also a lot of magic. Every new seasons pulls in with it a new revelation. Imagine if there was more beyond theborders of our maps? Feeling fartography and always left with the understanding that there is only a tiny fraction of what's onit that we'll ever get the chance to see. Egen fewer places shallwe ever understand.

I used to feel like your face and body were some kind of atlas. Thst by being so close to you and runmy fingertips oger the contour of your face and shoulders I could feel in thst arrangement of your features and structure. I could read it like Braille, as if your bones could allow me a better understanding of your meaning, making sense of who you are.

untenable adjective \ un·ten·a·ble \ ˌən-ˈte-nə-bəl \ not able to be defended not able to be occupied

This is what we kept stored in our back pockets: the lightning when it flashed violet across the sky, the feeling when the thunder rumbled your lungs right out of your rib cage, a collection of small shells, shattered into fragments by our own shoes, a crab, in an aquarium lined with seaweed and the residue of a siren song, the red mark on my heel, where the crab tried to defend itself. The red mark on your face, when i tried to defend myself.

And the terrors that flooded his bedsheets with chilling sweat convinced him that somehow he was losing his mind to the incomprehensible darkness he had seen in his uncle- his mother's brother stepped off a bridge and the water beneath may as well have been concrete. He wanted to assure others that he was still compus mentis, yet every time he spoke out for his argument to be heard, he knew he had been written off, being neither reliable nor credible. The best he could hope for was to be tolerated as irrelevant burden with no hope of being understood or helped. He was no longer of sound mind. How that could be possible baffled him with his pHD and his successful position of leadership at a publishing house. From this point and forever more,he knew that he would be avoided- seen as a problematic and intolerable. Some would see it as a waste, and mourn the man he had once been. Others did their best to hide their sniggering. To many, he was laughable.

valediction noun \ val· e· dic· tion \ ˌva-lə-ˈdik-shən an act of bidding farewell or taking leave. an utterance, oration, or the like, given in bidding farewell or taking leave; valedictory.

Those who get the chance to say goodbye are luckier than they know. I'm jealous because I never got that chance. Remember when I would play with loads of toys as a child and once it was time to clean up after myself, I made a swift exit. Sound familiar? But the truth is, even though it wasn't face to face and was 26 years ago and I put my goodbye in a letter, sent it off, and I was free.

I have never been good at farewells. At parties I'm the guest who stays because she doesn't know how to leave.

When I allow myself to daydream, I envision a house with so many roomsover a dozen, I bet- and yet I don't imagine that there will be any doors. No closing people out. No slamming. It's an Utopian fantasy home but what matters most is who stays with me there. I won't be lonely. Even after the goodbyes are done and I'll have to turn away so as not to watch you leave. I won't be alone because someone wants me to stay. It's a room with a bed so soft you sink right into it, and all the light is honey-gold and aglow. Everything I believed about my body has become something like the kind of flowers at people leave on graves. I only mean that it's growing from it's own decay.

wallflower noun \ wall·flow·er \ ˈwȯl-ˌflau̇ (-ə)r \ any of a related genus of herbs with showy flowers a shy or reserved person who remains on the sidelines of social activity When people say, ‘I’m a mess’ they’re not warning you off, they’re willing you closer. To see past the sadness at 2AM, the sulk of bottom lips, the crying at pianists, midnight meals, foetal positions and clenched fists.There’s something inherently vulnerable about it- ‘I’m a mess.’ It’s filled with a soft stark pleading you won’t hear unless you’re listening just right and all it means is, ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ or, ‘regret follows me like a shadow attached to my shoes’ and above all else, ‘please don’t leave me here alone.’

When people say, ‘I’m a mess’ they’re not warning you off, they’re willing you closer. To see past the sadness at 2AM, the sulk of bottom lips, the crying at pianists, midnight meals, foetal positions and clenched fists.There’s something inherently vulnerable about it- ‘I’m a mess.’ It’s filled with a soft stark pleading you won’t hear unless you’re listening just right and all it means is, ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ or, ‘regret follows me like a shadow attached to my shoes’ and above all else, ‘please don’t leave me here alone.’

xanthic adjective \ xan¡ thic \ ˈzan(t)thik \ of, relating to, or tending toward a yellow color Autumn is my favourite time of year. Not much changes from day to day when you live in a city- concrete, grey, exhaust and rattling crowds- and yet when the leaves in the trees you pass each day without noticing them turn copper, brown, red, russet or the colour of fire, you are reminded that time really is passing, the world does turn, and the cycle of life never ends, for even those leaves commit little yellow suicides.

She claims that her favourite colour is yellow, yet she is brimming with such endless darkness and pain that everything about her, and all around her, is overcast. I wonder if she speaks dishonestly, or whether she takes comfort in that colour, as a remind her that there will be sun to shine again someday after it rains.

There was a colour that I've never yet seen so brightly, so beautiful, shed on my shoulders, ever reflecting my hopes, aspirations, secrets- just the yellow of the sky and the golden leaves that soar over words as if on wings. When the darkness comes, it is still there- the stars and how they glitter on your skin. I wanted to rip out the pages of you. I wanted to, as if you were some notebook. But you're a 'tree-hugger' type- that's your label bestowed from others. Still, neither of us would ever rip out page.

Instead, somehow, we'd turn those words into a song, unparalleled in beauty, drenched in yellow, and it will always mean more than something I scrawled in a notebook.

yearning noun \ yearn·ing \ ˈyər-niŋ \ a tender or urgent longing There is a love that hollows the soul and refills it to bursting. There is a forest inside of me and all of the trees are standing to attention for you. They’d all fall on your order, too, give the word. Maybe you’re rain, or maybe you’re necessary, but you decide. I’ll say in this language, that only the right person and whales can understand - that if you come back, please come back, you decide. If you want Mondays to be Saturdays now, if you want me to paint the sky black, if you prefer love like tap water now, you decide. I will say your name like atonement, I will say your name like every ‘please’ I’ve ever meant, I will love you until birds grow in my throat, just come back, please, you decide.

I wish I could write about moths. Their delicate, fluttering wings dipped in ink would make beautiful art. I wish I could write about starlight. The magic of the heavens come down to earth in breathtaking radiance. I wish I could write about roses. Velvet carpets for the water worlds inside dewdrops make for an enchanting scene. I wish I could write about windows. Big or small, whether open or shut, these are gateways to freedom. I wish I could write about my mind.

The endless rainbow of imagination would paint beauty onto canvas and I would never want for another story.

And I will be okay. I will not drown in sorrow and loneliness now you are gone for all I want is to find happiness within myself. I will believe in love again. But I am not nostalgic for it now. Maybe I'll find a soulmate, perhaps a kind and adventurous boy, or a passionate and fiercely loyal girl. Until then, all I yearn for is to be myself, be free, and to never have to give that up for anyone.

zephyr noun \ zeph· yr \ ˈze-fər \ a gentle, mild breeze any of various things of fine, light quality, as fabric, yarn, etc.

I close my eyes and the soft breeze kisses my face, and for a moment it is as if the world is telling me just to stop for a second and breathe.

On a dewy, easterly wind, we drift between worn out and dog-eared pages, flipping over every leaf into a different reality. We could close the book and crack its spine and be done with it, but we want to search, even a world of fiction, relentlessly looking for our place, looking for peace, in a world of make-believe.

There’s nothing more peaceful than being sat next to an open window at night. the breeze is always cooler, lighter. sleepy. there’s that quiet hum of a city’s deep and lumbering breaths, the midnight wailing of sirens in the distance. this city will always be home. there’s something nostalgic here, in the flickering traffic lights and the whispers of my neighbours laundry in the wind, polluted with an slick, urban weight. i read somewhere that the happiest people are the ones that wake up the earliest. does it still count if you wait for the sun to rise? there’s nothing more content than the still hours of early morning, unwavering, suspended, and i’ll count the minutes until the sky to wakes up again. nights like these, and i wonder if it’s worth sleeping at all.