What is this malaise,
          that awakens with each yawning day.
Quite the tortured mystery,
          to have a mind that seems intent on being rid of me.
Staring at shapes of shadows,
          creating fables with a brain that’s addled
With a nameless affliction.
Kingdoms have lived and died,
          with only I baring witness to their fall and rise.
Scattered noon sunlight sneaks,
        between dusty blinds and sets aflame the world on my walls.
It is here that I feel,
          screams of terror and the joys of triumph.
The delicacy of a daydream.
A place for me.

My lucid sleeping has drawn the gaze
Of these dream demons that scheme against me.
This time of night, even the monsters have slinked away
Back inside their closet.

You have not known fear, rational or otherwise,
Until you lie powerless to the paralysis
That the dream demon wields so elegantly against me.
Like gripped by a vice, my body is held stiff.

My eyes wide open, or so my mind is led to believe
By the amorphous foe playing tricks with my deepest grief.
Contorting memories into the present moment,
A bedroom near identical to my own.

Hospital white walls, and the same clothes strewn about.
A faceless lady lay next to me, curved in shadows. My hand
Reaches out, but hovers just shy, as if set in stone.
Why cant I move? One more attempt proves of little use.

Just then, I am stabbed by six figures seven times and burned
Alive, but yet I do not die. Oh how I struggle to move
An inch or two, but this formless force denies. I demand
The demon speak to me, but before the thought can make its move
The loop repeats. I never die, but I always bleed.

Faint(adjective)- (of a sight, smell, chance, or sound) barely perceptible,
Like the beating of a broken heart being drowned out by
Screaming behind closed doors. The redness that circles
Around the crying eyes you use concealer to hide behind.
Faint as the sun shimmering over your receding silhouette
As you pass just beyond the horizon line, away from me.
Faint chances of survival, when fifty yellow-gold and black
Rosary beads hang free around the necks of those who surround you.
The tinge of iron you smell as your blood pools in your mouth, but
The will to never faint, as in fall to the ground in front of thirsty crowds.
Faint thoughts of happiness that arrive like butterflies, though
They never land long enough to wrap your arms around.
A faint pulse after chasing a feeling through a needle.
Faint, like the beauty of life being burned away. Ever faint
Are the screams of smoldering redwood trees.
The faint spinning of the globe, balanced on an invisible finger.

Lines on the page are like my personal prison bars;
Where all my arresting thoughts are locked away.
Ink and me, worn and fading
As each calendar day is torn,
Crumpled and forgotten.

Like a black hole, my journal entraps the light;
The turning of a page only paints,
An image of one perpetually falling.
Spiraling endlessly towards a center
I will fall short of reaching.

Set your sights out west, my friend
And know that on your back
Will always rest the dawn. Follow not
These golden roads paved by fools
Where every toll asks payment from
The only treasure one would hate to lose.
Pull the reigns on your hurried pace, and
Sing to silence when it calls your name.

Who will cherish me,
              When withering autumn leaves
              Are stripped of their golden gallantry
By the biting winter winds.

Writer and reader alike,
               Chasing streams of contradictions;
               Like our will to death, fighting for life.
Am I here at all if I am not here to stay?

Points of purpose in shallow moments;
               Ripped by tides and dragged away.
               We mind the depths,
So to never dig up our dead;

A fading
Remember when.

Time: our great captor
               Tattooed on Earth by currents
               Forever outpacing the fruitless lives of men.

Unearthed and submerged,
               In the instant between
               The angel opening their eyes,
And the tired who resign to dream.

My heart orbiting
Around these years old coffee rings
That blemish these fading,
Family pictures.
                          A path of precession,
Towards the vernal equinox of my thoughts.
When the sun’s light Scatters evenly across
Lines in the sand We never dared cross
                                       Or,          
The last solemn ride For better words left unsaid
Death truly does Do us part
                            Death of a feeling
                            Fleeting
                                        Stars
                                                Upon
           ­                                             My
                                                            Ceil­ing