“She is…

a suffering, whirling, phantasm of blood, staining the sky a thousand effervescent shades of violet. Bruised purples and anguished oranges stretch luxuriously from the radiant smile that warms the slate gray world around her. Desolate corners, midnight black and insane, like charcoal sketches, plague my heart and mind. Slithering tendrils of mauve love strangle and pollute the malice withered darkness. Gardens of hope and joy and love, once laid in with stones of security and fountains of warmth, where lavender lilacs pulsated laughter and winding pythons of courage wandered through my hollow body, now lay dead. The lilacs, dead, decimated, dilapidated, in their place dominates poison seeping from sobbing sores in the singed soil. Salted, sacrilegious, the pythons have peeled away into a swarm of squirming insects. Crimson embers burn low and toss merlot shadows drunkenly across rotten walls and crumbling plaster. Eggshell ruins, unkempt masquerade an inner network of shell-shocked nerves and dying veins. The clean waters of covenant and companionship coagulated into nauseating tar, as cold and lifeless as desert twilight. Too sick to function, too broken to cease. When will this torture end?

The lumbering stench of decomposition and illness drag behind the rolling torrent of black that fills the landscape. The darkness bleeds in a thousand directions, razor-thin tendrils of void shattering the earth like arcs of necrotic lightning. Swallowing, consuming, erasing. I allow myself a taste of air, the overly sweet stench of dead roses coating my mouth, before the tumbling waves of null screech silently towards me. The black is suffocating. The darkness is eternal. She is the darkness. I am everything. I am her. She is me.

The release is.. Pure.”

Nicholas LaRiviére is sixteen years old and attends Nanaimo District Secondary School in Nanaimo, British Columbia. This poem was written during a very dark time for him and his sense of being. It was written quickly and without a second thought.