XIII.

We are not but a game of dice,

Envisioned by chance,

Designed by gods,

Played by destiny.

We wander about

In eternal check mate,

Like mere pawns on a chessboard.

We breathe,

We take,

We kill –

We bend nature to our will.

We hate,

And love,

And fail —

We are failures at our own game. 

XII.

Enraptured, I sit

At the windowsill of my fears,

        And behold the sight of you,

An overflow of stardust,

From sparkly, clever ears.

Either close, or from afar,

It is you I hold most dear.

And when behind a cloudy sky

You so delightfully hide,

Even more it makes me love you -  

And wish to call you mine.

         

XI.

Nothing –

         No anger

         No hate

No pain.

Just nothing.

Pitch black, empty corpse

Devoid of motion

           Of feeling

           Of grace

Little android, indeed,

Rusty

and old

and maimed. 

X.

It has been commonly said, that

Life is all about farewells

And about learning to let things go.

However, as I watch London fade away

Into the distance, full of those dreams

That I yearn to make come true,

I realise how wrong that statement is

And how useless it proves to be,

When what I am leaving behind me

Is what I recognise as life itself,

Burning down into beautiful ashes

Of blue and black and charcoal grey. 

IX.

Lights out –

My soul craves to crawl

through muddy feelings,

Tear skin and fly away, far

From the infection that I carry.

Words –

Foes from my sanity,

Dripping arsenic and fear –

Wound me deeper than any knife,

Steal my breath and suck off my tears.

Sleep –

Ghouls and ghosts and bloody treason,

And creatures from murky waters below.

Creep from under my bed and grab me, but

My eyes refuse to close to nightmares.

VIII.

If I were to wake up every morning

To your heartbeat on my ear,

       Ticking away the minutes

Like a grandfather’s clock does –

       Little else would I require

To keep on with daily life

   For I’d have been the luckiest person

To receive the gift

             That is your love.

VII.

Flutter of wings inside my lungs

         Not the good kind, mind you –

But the kind that makes you start to cry,

Tears of blood and shame and sorrow,

   As you swim in a pool of your own dread,

And wonder:

             ‘When did I misplace my head?’

VI.

A sky of grey

Splashed by tiny, crimson droplets

       That drip down my arm.

It is the wound that heals

                     All broken hearts.

V.

It begins with a mere murmur,

A lonely giggle behind locked smiles.

The weight of the world –

         Treacherous ache of something we knew was coming –

Settles on my core.

I let darkness engulf me, and wonder:

               'Why have you switched off the stars?'

May your image fade away

As a thousand iron butterflies sever,

With sharpened wings, my pointless hope –

     An illness I can no longer bear to withstand.

Death only comes when the curtain has fallen,

And the giggle has turned into a full-blown laugh.

IV.

Cascades of molten gold

Drip down the prisms in your eyes.

They beckon a smile

Worth a thousand rays of sunlight

Which come to perish into this world -

Born out of a blue canvas,

And turned to Technicolour by the shape of your lips

Upon first saying ‘hello’.