A Little Bit Of Sunshine

I'm afraid there's not a single sincere bone in me That all I am and have been, has been carefully woven and moulded to perfection  Studied under the lens of critical eyes Precisely arranged and polished to gleam And when the day clocks out and night creeps in I begin to unravel my skin.  Funny, how I become more real when I dream When I leap out of myself and touch the ceiling Then, only then, am I true to my feelings For all my decisions are another's  All my words echo my mother. 

Dear T You are the soft horizon on a fictional landscape Just out of reach but ever in sight Where the sun is never quite as harsh as in real life But a world seen through a child's eyes Ringing about you is the sound of Carribean nights The beauty of African daylight The magic in ordinary life Witchcraft in the kitchen Spells in the chicken spice Imperfect jazz played by seasoned hands on the town square Ancient tales recorded on skin It is there you'll find me listening 

How it starts: She stops saying thank you..  She asks more and thanks less Her face shutters closed And her eyes, once sharpened blades become dull I can't tell which makes me more afraid.  Clipped responses and snapping glances...  I can never tell what sets it off If there's some quota I've exhausted.  But I shuffle along, haunted By the ghost of what was my life

"And there on my palm, was the troubling need to cut something.  Preferably myself.  More practically, a piece of paper." I finally understand the need  To bleed from a wound you can actually see The urge to drop ill from some terminal disease That meant some microbe had seeped through my skin Burrowed its way in And festered and spread all through my body That meant I could point and say, there!  There was the source of my pain  That if it could be explained, it could be healed Than to stand perfectly whole, but shattered into splinters.