Facial Bookcase

It's handy, having this bookcase in the corner of my room where I keep all of your faces. Each and every one of you grins up at me, right at my fingertips. I don't even need to leave this room with all of the company I need, right here, on the shelves.

But I don't touch you, your faces, staring back at me, would grimace at a touch and a pull from your place on your shelf. It is forbidden.

I don't need to touch or to hear, not with my bookcase stood mightily, over there. All I need is to catch sight of the right face at the right time and everything is right - no need to talk. You tell me things, each one of you, with your unchanging faces and I know it's true because it is there, laying before my eyes. Seeing is believing.

Without my shelves and your faces I would be completely disconnected, cut from the interaction. It is such craved interaction that everyone is here, everyone of you, staring at me from the bookcase.

My face creases into a smile and you all smile back as I sit here, staring at you as you stare at me. We're so together, connected. We never need to leave this room.

Mirrors

I stole your face and put it on the mirror. It was the only way, the only way I could keep you. But now, every time I try to see myself, your face engulfs mine and fixes itself in that knowing expression. I try to tell you that it couldn't be helped, that I had to. But you don't listen. Your face stays and stares and I can't look at it anymore.

I covered them all, every single one. Even the windows. Just so you can't get to me. I know you want to. But I won't let you. I should never have taken your face and now you punish me, you follow my steps and giggle at my wandering thoughts.

You're still there. Even though I put the rest of you far away, I hid you. But still, you come at me, without your face. I point you to the mirror. But you can't see it. You have no eyes.

I suppose you just want to be with your face, on the mirror. So I'll put you up there. Piece by piece.

RE: Pro and Prod

Pro sits on my shoulder, he leapt out of my brain when the thought of bringing Prod out for a time slipped into my mind. He shows me things, new things that I have never seen before, to tempt me, to stop me from remembering Prod. Suddenly I am itching to be creative, life is at my finger tips, waiting for me but Prod sits at the back of my mind, scratching at me and reminding me that I need to work. Deadlines. Deadlines.

But there is such fun to be had, Pro whispers from his spot on my shoulder. I sigh, I know he is right but I cannot succumb to him. Prod smiles from inside my head, he knows I will thank him for it later and I will.

Curious

I lost myself once. I was falling and falling and falling and it was nothing like I'd ever seen before. Curious. But I scarcely remember, it escapes me how I came to lose myself - for a self is not an easy thing to lose, it is quite firmly attached to one's person. I quite often wonder if I'd gone mad and a small voice seems to agree with me most vigorously, we're all mad down here.

Down where? I'd ask myself and then I'd remember falling. Sometimes I fall into such fancy to imagine that I was chasing time itself and that was how I'd come to fall. But that would be silly. Ridiculous.

When I came to find myself, I felt as if I had found a lot more than I had lost. There was something different about the 'me' that I had found but I don't recall what it was. Sometimes I think phrases like as mad as a hatter and feel I know something I shouldn't. But it's all fancy. All fantasy.

But I can't help but wonder why the cat keeps grinning at me...

Fate

I wrote of you, in the beginning, and asked you how it felt to live but I didn't realise, didn't see that you were only an image, only a thought. Only a record in the space of a dream. Now, you live.

I saw you sat there on the shelf and had to look twice. You winked at me then, called my name and whispered to me your secrets. I picked you up, caressing your textured cover and I knew you were mine.

"Do you need a bag, miss?"

"No, I'm fine."

Hello, Other Blog. How are you feeling now that you really exist?

525,600 Minutes

Silver-lined tears and smiles - we're all playing, living, breathing, existing, experiencing silver-lined songs, soundtracks, lives and loves. Breathe. Sing. Move. Live. Love.

A leaf falls, remembering forgotten autumn as the birds sing in the small of the morning. No day but today.

Targets

Prints dance across warm faux-metal colours, painting their ideas into the program - it is funny that such logic, such a thing made from numbers, symbols and things that most don't understand can be made home to such creative thought, such vastness, so many worlds and peoples. It is strange that such freedom can be held under such a tight schedule. Two thousand a day, no less. More is allowed, more is always allowed, welcomed and respected. But never less.

Progress comes from these dancing fingers as they make their mark on the program, weaving such beauty that the program, if it had feelings, might collapse onto its hypothetical knees and pray to the spectacled gods that created it.

And it should.

The program pales beneath the life it holds in its hypothetical hands as the dancing print-steps continue on in regimented specs of progress.

Two thousand a day, no less.

Words

The travel in great numbers, quickly spreading their rune-like shapes across the white of my page.

Crawl

Sitting on her throne, of sorts, she makes sounds filled with false-care and comments weaved from from a vague sense of immitated feeling - she is above us, it is her right. Her words seep with the sense that she is better, more talented, more deserving of the air around her. Slowly she slips in hints and crawling phrases looking to fulfill her craving for praise, recognition, attention.

But it's not about her, the stage is not for her to woo her unenthusiastic crowd. It is for us - our growth.

And still she stands - her words niggling at our ears, not listening to what we say and infecting us with the crawlers. They bite at our withered brains.

Again. Again.

With a tick it's over, we're free.

You

You are the awkward phone call, you're the alarm that doesn't go off. You're the food that's gone cold and the ice that melted too quickly. You're the shower that's too warm or too cold. You are the sleep that ended before its time and wouldn't come back to life until another night was over.

You're the mediocre dream, with no excitement or colour. You're the nightmare that won't go away. You're the headache that sticks messily to my head like hardened honey. You're illness, the cancer, the tumour. You're the strawberry scent of death, cold on my neck and my cheeks.

You're the darkness that I can't see through.

You're the cold in my room, the thick, insufferable, mindnumbing cold in the corners that creeps without a sound into my eyelids as I sleep.

Snowblind

It's not that usual blindness one gets up mountains from the sun's reflection on the never-melting snow, it's a different kind. More invasive. And yet, in its own way, it's enjoyable - the feel of the cold on my eyes and closed under my lids, the way it floats down upon them when it knows I don't want to blink, can't blink and won't blink. It's cruel but I enjoy it, want it even.

Everything is a haze of glowing amber, shapes of muted colours float past slower than they do in reality - everything's slower when snowblind.

In slow-motion, my life flutters past upon the wings of an all-too-freezing moth trying to make it's way to the warm light behind a window pane. I see moments in sepia tone, and I think, I remember. I close my eyes and melt them away.

Open again, I look up to the sky. Shimmering diamonds on blue velvet.

Fiction

Flash. With one taste your hooked. Flash. Scared, even. Flash. Addicted to the taste of that which has caught your eye. Flash. Not knowing whether it is fact or fiction. Flash.

You don't know when to stop. Flash. Whether you can stop. Flash.

It's hot, this feeling. Flash. There's a pounding in the chest. Flash. Adrenaline. Flash. You feel the want, the need to run. Flash. But there's nothing but air. Flash. Trapped in the freedom, you stumble. Flash.

But with one small click. It's over. You're free.

Symphonic

An oral potion, to be heard and not consumed - a beautiful composition, a concoction fit for the gods.

I breathe you in, close my eyes and the world changes.

Hatter

He stares down at me, watching my every move with uneven, unblinking eyes.

The patron saint of the mad on his throne. There, upon my wall.

He stares down at me, fueling each word I write.

Birthday

Today, it's your birthday. And I'm thinking of you. Or rather the absence of you; the hole that, until recently, had gone unnoticed. It doesn't hit hard or even often and when it does I am struck with confusion rather than a dull hurt and bruise. But I don't ask why, I don't seek never-coming answers. My eyes don't cloud and showers do not pour from them. I do not miss you.

But still, it aches. A small ache, barely bigger than a five pence piece. Barely noticeable after it has landed, spun, toppled and found a place to rest. I can barely feel it if I don't go looking. But it's there.

You're not gone but you're not here either. You swing between - an indecisive child with an unknowingly cruel mind, picking on ants and next keeping them as pets, oblivious to the damage caused unless someone tells you. But they won't. I am the ant to your magnifying glass, to your ant farm filled with sand.

There's guilt there, between the cracks and tunnels, like the ant that got away. Being wrong, in the wrong. It's not your fault, they'd say as they cling to what little they know. But then the question would come. Then whose? Silence or hapless blame. An answer crafted with lies to cover up what isn't known. And I'd be back there, wondering, wandering. Waiting for your glass or farm to come again, trying to guess which it will be.

And it will repeat.

I'm thinking of you, for the the first time in eons, it seems. And it's your birthday. And I don't know if I miss you.

Envelope

It sits there, the table, mocking me. Smiling silkily at me and begging me to approach it, pick it up and look inside. But I can't. And it knows. It knows and yet it still begs and calls come closer, come closer... in its all too seductive tone. A wicked creature, it is, luring and lulling my hand.

But, there's a higher power, a loyalty to keep. My hand is stayed. It still screams its pleading words and sends it's sugar-sweet lust my way. It wants to be open, to be seen, to be freed. But I wait. I wait until that word comes floating into my periphery and into my mind and then, only then, will I given to its cacophonous coos of come closer, pick me up and give me life...

Watching

The growling subsided but we've not moved. We've stayed still, stopping in our hunched places. Only our hands moving from time to time, eyes flickering and dancing across the room we sit in. All is quiet, save for the few feral grunts and yellings and the gasps, which come from none of us. We're observers in this.

The voices change, low, old, slow. Each breath, like the wind through dead trees. When the rage comes, the slowness sinks away and the pace becomes almost lethal. It doesn't seem possible. In fact, it's not. It's not happening, not really. But still, we make no noise. Only our hands move from time to time and our eyes flicker less.