1. Memories, For, When I Am. (Being edited 2024)

Pretend

Let's play pretend

a place where

faerytales and faerytails

run rampant like sugar dust on water,

let's think that for a moment everything will be ok,

let's think that for just a moment everything will fade away,

Ashes to ashes

Dust to dust,

but from the rubble rouses the phoenix waiting to spring,

but from the rubble rouses the dreams of children speaking, children dreaming,

children thinking of where better off they could be.

That is the only thing I know,

that is the only thing I have to show,

to blame for the loathing of a part of me

shrouded deeply, neatly, undeparted, uncarded, uncharted from

where I'd rather seek to where I'd rather be.

Trouble comes up from and through the tight knit creases in the rubble

and bubbles coming forth, to and from,

foaming and forming a froth in my mind of thoughts I'd rather

and like to disbelieve,

Children laugh and children play, they play in worlds

unreal like our reality hidden, bidden against by fate.

Not everyone can make you feel like you are who you are,

Not everyone can bite their tongue but instead tell you who they

think and want you to be,

Not everyone is relatively happy thinking everything they feel is made up,

Not everyone is relatively happy doing and feeling and becoming what everything

and everyone else wants.

From the rubble rouses the phoenix waiting to sing,

From the rubble rouses the needy dreams of children once speaking,

once thinking, once feeling, of things and places they would rather feel and

whereof they could of should rather be.

That place,

is so far of a distance away,

an insistence on resistance of resisting the things

so commonly humanly knowledged to the ones feeling

left upon and left out of the loop of the world choiring above them,

that they cannot show difference,

that they must adhere to the morality of another's mortality of being ok,

and that is where the pretending needs to stop,

that is where the pretend becomes less than ok,

that is where the pretend is killing these lives from the outside in,

wrenching what they know and thought they've left of themselves