Cast iron clouds call their brushed allegiance to the age-clad masonry.
Whilst the mangled percussion of the infants' school bickers
with the soft tones of the older boys' band.
Still their sound is drowned by the whistling wind,
carrying parents' pleas that it's time to leave,
as the small groups crawl through the churchyard.
In a mossy corner, the window-man clatters,
with his brushes and buckets at the side of the oak shaded vicarage.
A scarf slides from an old man's neck
whilst he motionlessly salutes the monument;
his medals are dull in the lacklustre light.
But for all that's here, there's one thing not,
where I sit by this silent 'here lies' spot.

I'm tired of days where I just laugh,
and sit so still and contemplate,
an inner peace and where it's from.
I always end with the same refrain.
How I can see with endless clarity:
they're nothing but guests in my reality.
But then this thought can drown me,
breed recklessness, not rationality.
So having peaked an immortal mountain,
and taken a while at dizzying heights,
I stop to look down at the road not taken,
and see before me the phase I begin.
From the other side on the hard road down,
the summit was ephemeral, I naive,
and the whole thing a pattern,
just another routine.
I'm tired of an utter lack of hope,
a nonexistence, a complete retraction.
I'm sick
of endless ups and downs,
Being battered forth,
and carried back again,
amongst the arms of no control.
I am right now in the terrible deep.
I'm so very tired of everything.
Yet still I cannot sleep.

We've built a city of memories from the ground to the sky,
they bloom between the buildings carrying offerings:
empty bottles once filled with imagined glories.
This spilled life courses beneath coarse tarmac, and it rolls beneath our feet.
the memories hide in the quiet corners where we heard the collusion of class.
They whisper from those thick front doors, with their shined brass streaming past.
They scream around the empty rooms, last echoes of a congregation,
baying and booming for their salvation under  pools of bass dripped ceilings.
They cling still, with their matching wordsto floors and buses, to fields and swings,
a tribute to the nameless places which birthed important things.
They meander amongst looming, fissured trees, caught in half-dark places,
then float to rest upon a bench between our pale white faces.
These memories now were moments then; as they skittered away down the lawn,
they left us silent but comfortably so, in the air of a red-grey dawn.

In a waking world,
where dreams are more often lost than found,
the single release is to dream dreams all the time,
and never have to live for them.