Once in a Lullaby.

The roaring twenties went out with a bang, and left deafening silence in their place, as idle minds and hands became devilish playgrounds at alarming rates, one black Tuesday darkened an entire decade.

As a war widow, she had no choice but to return to the dance halls from her flapper past.  Determined to avoid separation from her children, she jived until her feet bled red, white, and blue.

They only saw her bright-eyed encouragement as sunlight bounced off her teeth, and made them sparkle.  Her smile stole their attention from the tears that pooled in those same supportive eyes.  

As the massive ship set sail for Emerald Isle, she raised a white-gloved hand and waved goodbye one last time.  She sighed defeatedly, then collapsed onto the mossy dock, for it was all that stopped her, in that moment, from sinking to the depths of her own great depression.

Cluttered.

Reaching for a light switch as it 
transforms into a ferocious beast, 
words fly from my chaotic mind,
at record speed, then slip out 
from between artificial teeth.

I boil water in egg yolk, 
then eat a banana peel, 
put my pants on backwards, 
and fail to separate what's fake 
from what I once knew to be real. 

Elvis wails as Ella croons
inside my head, the whole day through,
and I sit, confused about the way 
that Billie Holiday could somehow
sing the colour blues.

Horns outside my window transport
me back to safari elephants,
as I become convinced that they've
returned to give me a taste
of my own medicine.

In my return to innocence,
where everything old is new,
I stop to smell the flour,
for life is far too short to spend 
each day retightening loose screws.

Earwig.

Anxiety's an infestation of the mind,
it lays its eggs under my skin, securing a foundation for the home where it will rear its kin. 

It is the black widow of doubt, and, simultaneously, its web; the venom in her sac, and yet, the prey within in her net. 

When sleeping fears are struck awake, they grin whilst baring fangs, delighted to claim their stake now that it's witching hour. 

The eerie thing about irrationality is that it isn't self-aware at all, as it stops to convince us that like a candlelit living room, we also have no power.

Untherapeutic thoughts can seem like millipedes, whose rows of feet can be felt as they compete in the Olympic games that are being held inside our chests as we concede defeat. 

There are schools of thought that somehow exist believing the past can't be relived. 

If that's the case, then I'm ready to take the world by storm as the owner of its first and only time machine. 

Unless, instead, I submit the termites who take tenancy in me when trauma hits as my receipts.

Intelligent as it might seem, insanity is adept at being quite obscene.

Currently it is a caterpillar who's built their cocoon within the fragile forests of my overripe emotions.

Dangerously close to the edge, even one misstep could force me to burst into a binge-eating, body-dysmorphic butterfly.

Pestered by its petulance, and its lack of diplomacy; without tact, and without warning, it arrives like an entitled ant.

Nattering like gnats and nettles, it chirps the loudest, yet has the least to say. 

It's a busy worker bee in bonded labour, and also its commanding queen who dials me on the daily though I've already disconnected the only phone number that it knows.