She tells there's music 

in my soul

while I lay here, drunk 

in her arms 

falling asleep

to the same old demons 

playing me the same old 

lullaby 

on bone flutes 

they carved from my own 

skeleton.

“Oh yeah?” I giggle, trying not to puke

“So 'dafuk does this so called 'music' 

sound like then?”

“it sounds like….” 

She pauses

“Pain… It sounds like 

pain.

But it makes me want 

to sing along”

While going through a box of my old shit in my grandma's basement, looking for something to smile about, I find nothing but blue ribbons everybody won, report cards with straight Fs, and school photos of a child with pain bursting through the seams of a broken smile. Nothing of any value whatsoever, except maybe this this old picture of the night sky I painted when I was too young to know that the world is full of things far scarier than the monsters under my bed, things so scary they'd make you wish those monsters were real so they could reach up from the shadows and grab you, ending it all.

watercolor stars...
when I could lay down the weight
of the universe