We are the most innocent trespassers of the night:
Disguising our flaws and tempting our fates,
Stringing our destinies together with spools of cerulean thread
As we spiral down side streets,
Our feet barely in contact with the road;
Asphalt withered and dried to a crisp,
Beaten and bruised.
But the magic leaking from our shadows
Heals what has been left unattended by the city dwellers
Too preoccupied with their petty worries,
Like the streaks on their bathroom mirrors
Preventing them from taking a good look at themselves.
As we revive this city, as we rejuvenate this life,
We are visible only by vibrant, auric light emanating from our spirits:
Something only we can see,
Something we have sacrificed our vision for,
Something we cannot escape from now,
But seeing only in shimmering colors is fun for we who give new meaning to maturity.
We hold our dreams at our fingertips:
Flying them like kites under the stars,
Letting them fill the open air
And grow as large as they desire,
Billowing and bulging up and up and up-
The red and white striped smoke stacks of our subconscious
Towering over our every motion and conscious thought.
Yet we guard them as though they were porcelain lockets strapped to our hearts;
Leather and lace running up and down the lengths of our souls,
Black and white braiding together as they go.
But that strength is not universal;
We are simply the lucky ones,
Yet that doesn’t make us better.
We aren’t greater people;
We weren’t born lying on pedestals of silken sheets and golden blankets
Nor will we die already inside of the gates of heaven.
We guard our dreams as porcelain lockets,
Pictures of our families on each smooth face;
Fighting off any weapon threatening to make one painted piece two, three,
Then a million.
We are pure-
Dancing under streetlights,
Bodies swaying tenderly to the beat of delight,
Glistening towards radiance;
A sheer layer of sweat resting on our limbs,
Kissing our foreheads
And clinging to the locks of our hair.
We cherish youth as one cherishes a memory;
Feeding our minds with sugary bits of it at 3am when the loneliness sets in
And painting rush hour traffic with its flawless fingers,
Long, slender and ghostly pale,
Travelling to each corner of every building stacked 10 miles high with cars and angry people;
Their tempers sewn together by the breath of a newborn
While ripped apart by its screams and cries.
We are not after perfection for,
For some sadistic reason that just happens to be perpetual perfection is always wrapped up in some other business in some entirely foreign universe that keeps its presence hidden under the folds of oxygen that block our access to the true breath of life.

We are the most innocent acquaintances of the night,
Shaking its blackened hand upon its grumbled request:
Pranic energy flowing from one life form to the next,
Enclosing it in the best thing you could never see,
Hardly knowing how much time we have left to make this difference:
To mend the broken hearts
Cracked open by virulent glances and the words that follow them,
To replenish the depleted souls
Of those who seem to think they have nothing left,
As they gaze at the darkening sky in an alleyway of a foreign city
Wearing tattered t-shirts and ripped khakis,
To rebuild the shattered lifetimes
Of those who seem to have forgotten to remember their steps as they maneuver through time.
Yet, after all of this,
After staying self-sufficient while living through extroversion,
The thing we do know-
The single thing we do know is what we have to lose;
But we just haven’t lost it yet.