What lies beneath her eyes?

Well, no one knows what she dreams and thinks.

Every grin and every glance is a guise

in the depths of cyberspace as she sinks

into the battles raging within

waiting for someone to see beyond

her eyes and into the life underneath her skin. 

Howard Beach. Queens. 

The wind exhaled drifting the smell of fish from the bay 

permeating the walls of her grandpa’s apartment.

Everything felt the same, but everything was different.

The soft hum of the news channel. The puff of smoke from his pipe.

Fleetwood Mac record melting on a rusted needle.

His jawline etched in wispy gray figures swaying like living ghosts. 

Now he sat in a present haze, 

an unconscious existence caught in the vortex of tragedy 

denying the chaos

and only accepting the tide of the ocean with the wiles of stillness 

bearing that comforting smell of the world he knew.

Everything seemed less real under the waves of oblivion, 

and that's what he needed.

She knew he longed for fiction--

his home, by the bay, indestructible. 

She once ran with innocence through the halls of his apartment,

but she no longer had that lens of childhood sweetness 

or his escape from reality.

New York’s too cold tonight.  

She shivered in the loss of naivete. 

The past. She grasps for a shard of your memory,

the one where she rested beneath the sleeping sun 

when the stars asked for her to stay until the earth awakened

surrounded by fireflies glistening in amethyst air

and the midnight sky lay like a dream of possibility. 

Her soul sang silently, 

reaching out towards the blades of celestial honey 

between twilight’s shadows. 

But you are in exile,

banished in the blur of a world 

she calls the horizon 

since she knows she may never reach it.       

In the morning she walks barefoot in the dew.

As droplets fall, her toes touch the trembling flesh of the earth

in the ash of flames that brought the earth to its knee,

aching for mercy. 

Feeling stagnant in the shroud of calamity,

she spends her days, a nomad of cyberspace,

waiting for a smile, waiting for someone 

to restore the universe to its graces.

She thinks she is foolish to believe the sky full of stars is more powerful 

than the ravages of crisis that rust the world she once knew.  

During the week,

graceful phrases fall from her lips to those 

across the screen dimensions away.

She gazes at a boy knowing all about him. 

Knowing nothing.  

She loves his hair, heir of awakened light.

She loves his eyes, tempest of surging seas.

His shield of divinity the girl adores-- 

But it bans her entry, for she is not golden.

Swathed in the gloom of invisibility, 

her kaleidoscope eyes scrutinize

her body, her face, her flaws

and resists the inevitable pangs of hunger 

seeping through her mind

to try and reverse the barren bud of beauty.

The paralyzing chains of insecurities

nurture the myth of the mirror.

The pixels echo the unraveling of her eyes

once gleaming with flecks of stolen dawn   

now dulled like the thorns of a withering rose.

Her hollowed face and empty presence

fade into the codes of the internet

as she sits

 waiting for someone to notice. 

In the digital divide,

the eyes

translate what surges beneath the glass of our pupils,

but our stories and troubles remain unknown 

because only a few venture beyond the pixels...