Whisper from the song that beats within my pain-filled frame.

Burn my eyes with the stars.

See me as I am, not as I was.

Musical death surrounding all I was and wish to be.

Drinking my soul from the coffee jar, beneath my rusting cage.

Below the cage,

Beneath the jar,

The tiny music belt,

Beats upon my fraying knowledge that is something I won't share.

Which is something I don't care to hold within this little belt,

Of music which is pain.

Pain that is my knowledge that I place into your hands.

Hands that are soiled,

With the pain of others.

With the screams from the child never borne within.

Placed into those pained hands is my unshared knowledge.

Lost.
 
 
 
 

Worded wisdom,

Not displayed for others' comfort.

Held within or on the paper which I print from the box.

Paper that has felt nothing,

Paper that never will feel anymore,

Than the hate and pain it's dealt from my decayed hands.

From the scrawny bone-fed sticks, that spread my drain.

Dripping from my hair,

Dried and tied,

At splitting ends.

That whispered no more than is said.

And says no more than is read.

From the paper,

From the box,

Nothing listless dwells within.

Nothing more than a single belt of music beating.

Slowly deadly on my cage.

Deadened finger reading words,

That no ears will ever witness in their time upon thy head.

Printed madness on the corner of the paper that I share.

Once and only turned and,

Gone.
 
 
 
 

Once again the beating music burns the paper that I bear.

Once again the screams of hate and joy despair.

Nothing but a blank page,

Deprived of the words a paper dreams for.

Given nothing,

But a stolen glance upon its whiteness.

Lost and dead,

And folded away.

No more notes dead fingers play.

Jagged little pinprick pain stabs me.

Piercing large seductive rain that stills me.

But no more words,

These scars will speak,

Had their turn.

Passing on the family trade to another bleeding hole.

Nothing in comparison to the empty deadened look,

Bestowed upon you.

One love never held.

Tight hands never touched,

Dead world,

Never pushed further than its boundaries.

Face of nothing but the atoms,

And molecules that surround.

That are in the space of air that the face exists.

Listless.
 
 
 
 

Empty nothing,

Abyss beyond the deepest hole dug into the belt.

In which the music flows.

Writing words upon the paper that I hold forever still in my cage.

That I plaster with scars of prints from the box.

From the world outlived its boundaries,

Deformed and mutilated.

Children wander, burning, dying.

Do I wish to live?

With this beating on my cage,

Where I hide to tell the story of my coffee jar.

With my scars and box of paper that is blank and empty still.

No more words I speak.

Finger-less bones rest.

Once outspoken never left the ears or cage alone.

Never left the paper to be all it was.

Scarred.
 
 
 
 

Phil  Etherington (age 15)

© May 1998