My head's like a fortress, I keep my thoughts shut away
my heart is a failed church whereupon I go to pray
the birds seem to float in the golden morning sky
as my eyes bleed from a sleepless night of cries

CRASH!

every castle falls, nothing but shattered memories and rubble
lies and pretence form around like a protective bubble -
I gaze at myself in the mirror with no recognition
once a beacon of strength bled dry by self-mutilation

emotions seeping out like radioactivity
ideas twisted, obscure, lacking creativity
infected by the evil I've strived to appease
anger bulging from the vaults of disease

I can't hold it anymore, my insides are imploding
(corrosive)
surviving with a fear you can taste, ugly and foreboding
(explosive)
cursing my body of scars physical and transparent
on the outside my torture is far from apparent

seeking a saviour, someone to eat away my flesh when it goes black
I'm sick, I'm dying, I just need to go back
to the origin of the despair that's tainted my whole existence
then maybe, just maybe, I can find happiness without any persistence.

*(alas, if only)

A weathered door of a face.
Her house, captured in a bubble,
on Anterograde Lane.
In the dark; in the corner,
her leg, scarred in cursive, propped,
like the whole of her frailty; on a
budget wheelchair, second hand.

A boy, brand new,
who will soon be old enough
to forget what happened.
What mother? On the road,
smeared with hot, gushing
jet-black highway blood;
encompassing the coagulated
being of what was, and, only
in hushed talks, a mother.
What daughter?

How old are you, this time?
These words slip out of a smile.
And she wishes she could hold him
-- but her frayed fingers fight back,
with every twitch trying to touch.
Delayed comfort becoming devastation
-- 4 years-old. She can hardly believe it.

Pain eats her grocery bag arms,
bulbous in her bones like
confused locusts, frenzied.  
The boy's eyes are a deep brown
nutrient-rich soil, perfectly fertile;
needing to be cared for and grown.

Forever, she could, protect him from
The Lurking that killed his mother.
At the very least, for however many
remaining years. Three. Five. Eight.
Becoming a lantern before his sight;
guiding him from dangerous design
drifting between trees, in the dark.

Here I stand, a monument to my own destruction,
carrying on the work of an ancient construction.
Hands made of callouses designed for moving rocks,
seconds pass to minutes to hours on the clocks,
and life flows downhill through the roots of a Viking tree,
to the garden, to the sea.

Yggdrasil weaves its trunk through my history,
how it knows my life is its greatest mystery.
Its leaves reach to the heavens and caress the clouds,
through its xylems and phloems travels the worlds crowds,
and life flows downhill between the roots of this Viking tree,
to the garden, to the sea.

The gods of dark places fight their battles in the light,
and all the eyes of all the folks turn from the murky night.
Yggdrasil stands tall like a black tower ‘tween land and sky,
where the hearts of the bravest men climb towards a lie,
and life flows downhill by the roots of the Viking tree,
to the garden, to the sea.