"The Outside"

By Elise Bugeja

Glassy eyed I gaze

Glazed over. Overly muddled by the overpowering thickness of the humid fumes

The ever changing global warming in this glass house.

It’s a small bubble. Adorned with intertwining possibilities of ‘The Outside’

Those pesky if’s and might’s which scram the soil in pursuit to strengthen our roots

Latticed eyes enlace the boarder. They smile and monitor your growth rate.

Oh and of Corse,

there is a superior growth method. That one isn’t just a rumour.

It’s that glass ceiling I look up to that looms over my head

Unbreakably intimidating it flickers its twinkling teeth.

In a group of my own I’m bound to the ground

Bound to scrounge and burrow for any extra nutrients I can obtain

Some need more than others, the whispers trickle around

You’ll find out sooner or later where you stand in the pecking order

The more attractive of my sort stand proud, everybody knows who they are

The ‘lesser watered’ stand in their shadows

Everybody knows who they are too…

Such buzzing updates from these two corners are communicated through the roots.

Anticipation for the imminent harvesting is dictated by the changing leaves

Fallen from trees onto dank and mossy underfoot

How they have become brown and have wilted

Their water flows down their arms as they reminisce the days in the green house.

How could they miss breathing in those defining fumes that engulf the persona you neither know nor want to change.

They whisper their legacies under the cracks like forbidden lovers.

‘The adventures of a life on The Outside.’

The only defender from the life of growth and the life of wilting

Is this crying glass, denying any falseness to its distorted reflection of the magical Kingdome we heard is called ‘reality’-

Plucked from our comfort zones we are placed in the basket

Some with white charming scraggily roots still in toe,

Others... without….

The ones with the doubts who were told they’d never make it out

Stand on show with the superior of their kind

With an eyeful of sun, our lungs magnify with the real air they all spoke about

Now for the rest I guess

The magically ambiguous abyss, they call- “The Outside.”