If I were a painter
I would capture your likeness
When sat under yellow light
Playing games at the table
Or bathed in the flickering glow
Of a campfire underneath the night’s sky
Your skin a playing field
For different shades of red
So I might remember
With perfect clarity
Your contour that I could see
Sitting opposite of you

Perhaps when I
Warn myself
Of unrealistic fantasies and dreams
I forget that there
Is such a thing
As unrealistic nightmares
Too

I cannot romanticise the fact
That I have no clue what I mean
My thoughts are an uncoordinated scramble
Here this
That
Something else
Something something
Something with meaning
Elusive words I pass through like mist
It is cloudy in my mind
I itch to knock on a door
And have it be Clarity who opens
But I only ever stand on the threshold
My feet glued to the ground
As a voice calls “come in!”

There’s nothing so soft makes me cower
As the ticking of a midnight clock
In this still and quiet hour

I sit, enveloped in the thickest dark
Comfortable and all alone
Upon my mind this echo leaves its mark

I’m free to contemplate without the noise
Of day’s loud vibrant life
I'm left to think of choice

Were it for this soft sound to leave my ear
Then I'd face true solitude
Not sure if that would a bane, or dear

Oh! For true silence, yet I daren’t mock
The quiet ticking of a midnight clock