Flame-Blooded

listening to your old music is like meeting your past self, getting to know the person you once were all over again. You see yourself from someone else's eyes as well as your own.

Streetlights are poor effigies made in the image of stars.

I feel diseased, sickly around others. I feel so rotted on the inside, like I'm staining the table my friends and I are eating at. It hurts to be around people, but it hurts more to be away.

There are walls of glass between us. They reach for my hand, fingers against crystal, and wonder why my skin is so cold.

I can never shed this sadness, can I? It's structural to me, woven through my bones and between the fibres of my muscles, pouring through my veins alongside my blood, pumped greedily by my heart straight into my brain. It's madness is essential to me, a rot that stains me my signature grey.

I do not believe in religion. And yet, when I lie under my blankets, feverish from the heat, I truly believe that even God cannot see me. The temperatures halt my infections, the walls of my cell containing the disease. Underneath the blankets, I am nothing but raw, bleeding flesh.

I wake up, and I'm alive, so I go on living. I pretend that lake inside my heart is frozen over. My mind slips free for a second, and then I'm drowning in freezing water. I claw my way out. I go to sleep cold.

"I wish I was born in the 70's", "I wish I was born in the Victorian era" Well I wish I was born in a time where this desperate need to serve something greater than myself would be fufilled.

Those moments captured forever in your eyes. Scenes of ordinary, worldly beauty, yet so raw and portent they break your heart a little. A rainy lamppost from the window of a car. The sunrise breaking over your open window. The night sky in a place whose name you've forgotten, but the stars stay burnt into the roof of your skull.

And maybe when I say I miss home, I mean I miss being a kid when my parents loved me, and the world was new and huge and the only thing I had on my mind was exploring it.

I'm in constant burning, agonising bliss, clutching the pain so tightly it's claws wrap around me. I am joy and pain and rage and serenity.

I'm already exhausted. I defeat one foe and walk headlong into another. There is no rest, no peace, nothing to spare me. Sleep is a mindless void, and waking is being dragged feet first back into hell. Day after day, I wake up, cut my way through existence with sheer will and rage, and fall into unconsciousness, plunged back into my toil next morrow