White

This white is solitary,
Giving me a place where the silence is screaming,
Giving me a place where the world is my own,
Giving me a place where love is in my sight but not my reach.

They say love is pain.
Well, from what I know of the
Atrocity
And the shattering hurt,
The frustration, the anger,
With every so often a rare, fleeting little glimpse of joy,
Love deserves a word far more elaborate than that of pain,
In this far from simple world.

Green. Yellow. Red. Purple. Blue.
If the world is not so simple,
Then why do I see
Flowers and
Leaves and
Trees and
Hear the soft, untroubled voices of the birds?
Unless my perspective is so far gone,
What I wake to each morning as my reality is
Far more engrossed in a dangerous, piteous angst,
So far from joy and simplicity.

And yes, I can change the world by nightly closing my eyes
But the awareness in my subconscious still
Haunts me with the inevitability in my bittersweet escape—
As the world remains, awaiting in my awakened state.

I see everything with a dark filter.
Opaque, and so severely distant from the innocence that I tried to hold on to.
I’ve chosen to see the world
In all of its elaborate splendor—
Nothing more than an elaborate tragedy in which we all play our part.

My mind is forever overcast
Or straddling the ladder between night and day,
Clinging to twilight so that I do not fall prey to either side.

I fly away from happiness
Like an insect from a citronella flame
So attracted to the light,
But burned by the harsh reality that is the fire.

Is it not safer for me to then exist in darkness,
In which there is no disappointment
And the consistency keeps you safely cloaked?

The sky is white and blank tonight,
As is the spectrum of my emotions and my life
That floats between the colorful and the black.

Each day of my life is a turning of a page,
At the will of a reader as the plot progresses.
In this life I’m told I have all the control in the world
Of my life
And of my fate
And of my destiny
Yet at times
I doubt my power to change my life and make it go forward.

In books, I have the power to stop time
And take the euphoric dive into a world
Where I would stay forever.
There is tragedy, sadness, anger, and hate
But through all the hardships there is
An ever-constant dream
To be accessed in reality.

I envy those who have it,
And if it could be granted,
One day of my life I would gladly exchange for theirs.
For what I know of love,
It is either filled with unattainable joy
Or filled with pain that no barrier can withstand.

This world—my world—has proven
So elaborately constructed with pain
And its contrast so elaborately poetic
And constructed in a way which appeals
So much more than my own.

I am being teased by the elaborate
From all directions
To the point where white is a relief
And I cringe for the times when the darkness overtakes me
In my ache for one side.

And so you see I straddle the line
Between the two
Lost in white
Growing closer to the darkness
Where I fear my settlement would be permanent.