You're dreaming of fairy tales that will never come true,
Would you really want them too?
Falling into fire
Keeps your chin up high,
Your feet flat on the ground
And your head in the sky.

a quiet story
before the locked doors or
three way mirrors
a spider whispers

a lesson from a devil on hot
pale scales pipe high virginal
ballads in black smoke broken
by smiling Poussin

bells plunge down towers
sweetening prisons with
spiders clenched recitals
and 24 carat bourbon

I strove with none; for none was worth my strife;
  Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
  It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

I looked into the darkness
  And they were there
Some were barely twenty
  A few a little more.

They did not move,
They were dead.

And the war went on without them.

Back into the jungle
Like deadly ghost we went.
I looked behind me,
They did not follow

They did not move
They were dead.

And the war went on without them.

A flash of fire, a terrible pain
  I cry out to my mother.
Wait for me I cried
But no one heard.

I did not move
I was dead.

And the war went on without me.

"Here the hangman stops his cart:
Now the best of friends must part.
Fare you well, for ill fare I:
Live, lads, and I will die.

"Oh, at home had I but stayed
'Prenticed to my father's trade,
Had I stuck to plane and adze,
I had not been lost, my lads.

"Then I might have built perhaps
Gallows-trees for other chaps,
Never dangled on my own,
Had I left but ill alone.

"Now, you see, they hang me high,
And the people passing by
Stop to shake their fists and curse;
So 'tis come from ill to worse.

"Here hang I, and right and left
Two poor fellows hang for theft:
All the same's the luck we prove,
Though the midmost hangs for love.

"Comrades all, that stand and gaze,
Walk henceforth in other ways;
See my neck and save your own:
Comrades all, leave ill alone.

"Make some day a decent end,
Shrewder fellows than your friend.
Fare you well, for ill fare I:
Live lads, and I will die."

noise falls away in colorful strokes
to reveal the solid backdrop of silence
a glaring white canvas with unprovoked audacity
I turn away, but find my nose pressed
against the same blank page
in frantic movements I look up, down, around
a white prairie surrounds me, deep as the horizon