A little girl walks lonely,

Through the twisted thickets that prick her soft skin,

Tears form at the corners of her gray eyes,

Eyes like the sky just before a storm,

A storm that rips apart homes and tosses trees nonchalantly,

Into buildings and oceans,

And still the girl is walking,

Alone, but not afraid,

She understands that no one is there,

She is aware of the crippling loneliness,

Brought by the tearing of tiles in her pale pink bathroom,

As the water rushes into the tub,

And the voices in her head keep screaming,

Yelling, demanding that she tear down more tiles,

Chipping them off with her bare hands,

With her bleeding fingertips,

Soot under her bitten down nails,

Her bones almost broken from the boulder on her shoulders,

But she keeps lugging the rock,

The weight of a thousand suns,

Through the twisted thickets,

Her arms are bleeding,

Trickling down her leg is red,

Red as her hair after she falls down the stairs,

And her blonde locks are stained with her blood,

Her knees are cut,

By the shards of disgust

Her ivory skin is flushed green,

From a fiery envy,

A burning jealousy of every girl she sees on the path she follows,

She notices that their trail is not bumpy,

It is not uphill,

And there are no thorny bushes or branches scratching their tan skin,

They are safe, they are smiling,

Why is her passage so narrow, so rough,

She sits in her bedroom,

Her mattress is worn, she has no sheets,

She is cold and shaking,

But it is nothing new,

She is used to the chilling silence,

Besides the squeaks of the rats on the beams over her head,

And the shrill screams of demons in her ears,

The walls echo a dangerous quiet,

The piping cry of a kettle shrieks from the other room,

But the little girl lay still,

No motivation in her to stand up,

To turn the stove off and stop the screeching,

Every morning, she washes her eyes out with bleach,

Rather than chugging it,

Her gray eyes are now bloodshot,

The bleach makes her blind,

Unable to see beauty,

When she looks in the mirror,

At her unsmiling reflection,

The little girl thinks a sink will wash away,

Her mistakes,

Until day breaks and new ones appear,

Old ones resurface,

Her hands are tied by the lies,

Told to her by her beloved,

Through screams from the beyond,

She believes her dreams have died, cried,

Like she does at night,

Under the stars seen through the open ceiling in her bedroom,

That Father cannot fix,

Because he takes a swig of liquor,

Then he licks his lips,

Unbuckles his belt and shouts,

She is used to the punishment brought forth by authority,

Her voice meek,

Her heart weak,

The little girl's path is breaking,

The cobble is cracking and the thickets are clearing,

Down the street from her home is an oak tree,

Decaying and rotting like her spirit,

Like her heart,

A dying bouquet blooms in her lungs,

She cannot breathe,

As if shards of glass are cutting her esophagus,

Her dreams are possessed by a shaking, aching terror,

Terror like the trigger of a gun,

Pulled back by her enemy,

By the monsters in her mind,

Taunting, haunting, wishing her the worst from the edges of the dark,

From the cusp of chaos,

She can hear a horrific scream,

Yet it is no one but herself,

The little girl feels her heart twisting,

Like the thickets on the path that is ending,

The dark around her is becoming light,

Her mind is rotting,

Like the oak tree down the street,

There is a hole in her soul,

Like the roof of her room,

Her fingertips are bleeding,

There is dirt beneath her nails,

Because her time is spent tearing tiles in her pale pink bathroom.