Young Writers Society

I think this is prose poetry, but I don't really know. =P

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There's a spyglass made of hazel eyes and it sits on my old desktop, singing a tune that it never manages to keep in rhythm. It peers through me so I can see the sky, like crushed M & Ms someone suspended in a bowl of soup and dripped wads of icing over. I glide through the glass and wade through the viscous rivers, walking and stumbling and tripping like I'm on a tightrope but I'm not afraid to fall.

If you cracked an egg in the sky you'd see its yolk dripping and painting the sky a dappled yellow-gold. Plaster a star-sticker to the sky's cape and you could watch the sun flicker and then shine brighter and just keep on shining. Sprinkle stardust through the silent moors and watch the dawns fade, watch the constellations smile down at you and write letters to the world that they seal in gold and fling like a green-glass bottle into its ocean depths. But the bottles crack before they reach us and the ink washes away to a mass of sooty tears so we'll never know what it is that they want to say.

I hum a metallic test-tube song and the sky synchronizes with my voice so the clouds hang around me and I run my hands through their crystallized substance. I'm carried away by the infrared waves of the horizons and seep into the melody and the tangible sense of unreality that parades through me. The doves brush past my atmospheric perch and carry me even higher; and I'm just so lost I don't even remember where I began.

My head is an attic of odds and ends I hold onto, living in the old-fashioned perfume dusts and creaky pendulum mood-swings. I harness the stars and sew them on my turquoise sleeves, riding them like reins to a sky-sled, but with every passing second I can feel myself growing tired. The magnetism hurls through me -past me, and I'm too late to realize that the sky and the land are one, and the constellations have been whispering to me this whole time, telling me that every adventurer must return home to an ending- to a warm, fuzzy closure.
When I think of endings, I think of cookies and hugs. But I open my eyes and the coldness seems to be drawn through my irises and into my brain. I'm frustrated, and I listen to the sounds of the ocean, yelling out to them until my lungs deflate and I fall. There are no glass bottles here; no letters, no constellations to console me.

I cry, because I'm tired of being strong and pretending to be brave. I want to fly, because my insides are like hollow caverns. I want to dream again, and walk hand in hand with a fellow dreamer through these tightrope wanders. And the tears fall, so they rub the dust off my wooden soul. An unseen emotion spins cobwebs inside me and each intricately woven thread is asking me a million questions, but I think this is a paradox that is better left unsolved.

I hear the music knock at my door and when I open it I can feel myself drowning. You send me a smile and I believe it is you who has taught me that smiles are inverted helium balloons that float on your face in an upside-down sway. But the thing with helium balloons is that they always float to the sky, no matter what.
I smile back at you and the helium carts me away for a spin through the stars.

I'm a lightweight sail-ship coursing on, higher and higher, and as we sprint through the sky I can't feel the glass walls around me anymore. And I don't notice the spyglass that lies shattered by my windowsill for the remainder of the night. For it you who will escort me now, on our own Hubble telescope; our space shuttle made from old milk-cartons we never threw away.

So let's fly, dear Imagination. Let's fly.

And we'll dream of hazel spyglasses tonight.