The Worlds I Make

I want to be alone.

I want to be alone in the neon cities I've created

Where pink stoplights and blue streetlamps

Make a painter's purple on my skin, pale with grief.

I want to be alone in the place of hunched stoned homes,

Streets cramped with life and uneven with neon-lit cobblestones.

I don't want the blue light of the screen to colour me grey anymore.

.

I want to be alone in the little worlds of neon dreams with their injustices

Crafted and balanced with a perfect eye

And a steady hand that's never trembled from poison,

Never vibrated with psychopathy.

Leave me in the metal buildings riddled with glass boxes,

Windows more like an exhibit,

And leave me alone to be the star of a dismal show.

.

My bones are dizzy, jittering sideways on a loop.

Am I falling? Is it an illusion?

Or is my soul breaking, sliding out of my flesh?

Where did those neon worlds go?

What happened to their hopeless, despairing kings?

Maybe the kings were never there to begin with and this

Hopeful mind made them all up.

.

Does that make the dreamers in the city a lie

Or does it make them optimists?

What am I then, if not a god? A devil?

The marrow in my bones has rotted and I am left hollow,

Wondering what good exists in the cloudy skies

Of a world without pretty lights,

Only phone screens, depression, and loss.

.

There is acid in my heart and dirt in my lungs.

I want to go home to the place I made

With pink streetlights and purple streetlamps.

I want to go home to a place that doesn't exist,

To an imagined universe with problems

That could never be my own,

To a loneliness I could only ever dream of under these skies.