Hive
My mind is a prison; the walls are pink:
no sanctimonious soul, no piercing voice or echoing song. A rainy day turns into a rainy week;
hours to nitpick at only what is wrong. Pessimistic hummingbirds—not in the sky— but perched on the branches of my intestines. Like wilted sunflowers in the middle of July, the sun refuses to point in my direction.
If only I could cut through the gloom,
and grip the banister on the staircase of joy. I can almost smell euphoria’s perfume,
but the wooden steps have all been destroyed. A ten-letter-word, missiles loaded,
my normal duplicate was murdered.
Powder kegs of sorrow have already exploded.
The lines between sad and unwell are forever blurred.
A swarm of bees—the queen’s favorite hive
burrowed, dripping honey, doubt, and intrusive thoughts, into my incapacitated mind—
leaving me bumbling and distraught.
“Calm down,” they verbalize, as my body is swallowed whole by the ocean’s remorseless riptide.
My timorous heart is bitten out and hollow; certainty escapes like pieces of earth in a landslide. “Relax,” they utter,
as I return from the edge of the milky way.
Like a butterfly’s broken wings, I almost flutter— healing from thirty thousand light years of pain.
A seven-letter-word hanging over my head, neon lights—hot pink iridescence.
In a war of me versus myself, hope turns up dead
on the bloodstained battle lines in my mind: obsolescence.