On youth

When you are young, you have a right to be liked because you are young.

And it’s easy to think the affection is forever, but you will find there is no reason to like you when your youth is gone. Unless you have used your youth to become a pillar of strength, a pillar of light, there is no reason to like you.

It is a hard lesson to learn. Bitter to swallow.
Many never do swallow
and cling to chimaeras,
daddy’s I love you’s,
previous triumphs.

They don’t know there’s an ocean out there
All the once young drift in,
A soup of sad, lonely leeks
Who have nothing but dreams
And regrets.

Like banks

Banks only give money to those who can prove they don’t need it.

We only pity those who will never ask for it.

We only love those who are already strong.

We as a species have a fear of giving before taking.

While I think it perfectly just
To have some proof of worth,
I’d like to, just for a second
To live in a world where one can
Bask in compassion and pity
And not be pathetic.

Love

As a child

I was taught to mistrust love.

All of it.

When people loved me

I laughed and thought

They were

hilarious.

 

Then I learned

how to apply love:

how you seal wounds with it

and don’t ask questions.

 

Now that I know,

I want to be loved again.

But my phone won’t ring

and people get lost in regrets

scattered around my fortress.

 

My hands they frighten me

My hands have aged. In the photo, my face and belly are cuddly baby fat, and I look not a day over twelve. The poor excuse I have for boobs barely protrudes from beneath my shirt, two asymmetrical growths, almost malicious.

But it’s the hands that shock me. They are so white and smooth. Baby hands. I am twenty in the photo.

Eight years on, there are so many lines. Detailed maps of faraway fucking kingdoms. I stare at my hands on the tube as people stare at me staring at my hands. I am like the weirdo who grooves along to their iPod, only I groove to the mortality of hands.