I'm not so bad,
Am I ?
You don't need to be
Scared of me.
Come closer,
I won't bite.
Forget what I
Said earlier,
I'm not really
Out to get you.

I sleep by the fire,
Waiting for it to burn out.
Wake me when it ends.

Turned and twisted out of shape,
I stagger away from the inferno,
When I come face to face with another,
My eyes staring into hollow sockets.
What apparition is this?
It's bony finger points the way
To a hollow opening.
I emerge into a
Vast cave,
Illuminated,
Where cloaked figures are
Conjuring up new forms
To replace what remains of the old.
"Is there no escape
From the wasteland?", I ask.
The solemn figures continue,
Mournfully,
Seriously.
The apparition returns,
And tells me it is I who
Perceive things wrongly.
The wasteland is my mind, it says,
If I did not earlier see the
Enchantment,
I will not see it now.

Spiky wavy lines
From the center of the sun;
I must be so high.

I've figured out, perhaps,
The problem of my
Procrastination, which is
Nothing more than a
Denial of
Reality.

Trying very hard
Not to over-think
While the lack of action
Brings me to the brink.

Tall trees like antennae
Rattling with lightning
The air thick, viscous, resisting
Walking in these parts
Is never fun

His mother's hand,
His father's pen,
The empty land,
The hurt within.

Run, run, run!
Through the field, but
Wait, wait, wait!
For me, I'm not
As fast, and
Look, look, look
At me take a fall.

Returning now to the scene of the crime.

I was a different man.

At a different time and a different place,
I will find one person the same

Not so silently, that I miss it myself,
Speak a little louder to me,
I'm setting sail for the lonely isle,
Over the lonely sea.

Look, this hour, the moon rises,
Watching over the moor,
Would you wait on me, in the field,
Till it rise no more?

There is a time, after time,
This you must believe,
For I'll see you there, in that certain place,
Where there's none to grieve.

The hardest part about
Growing
Is fighting
This sense of time
Running out,
Of wishing
I can do better than I did,
Wondering
What happens if I don't,
Dreading
What happens if I can't

Not enough to die;
I must create a new life
From my former self

To decide what to do,
It might help to
Focus on what you would
Regret not doing.

Why do you keep me alive,
In pain? Why am I not dead?
I do not understand your wisdom.
Why am I dragged in chains,
Through the filth of the world?
What purpose are you driving at?
Why do you treat me so? Do you not
Believe I will rise in anger the moment my
Cage is unlocked, my
Manacles are opened?
Or do you believe by this I will
Learn some Principle as yet unseen?
Do not hide the future in this mist!
Why do you tempt me?
Can I not tear everything down,
Even at this moment?
Why are you so certain?
Why must I be tested in blindness?
Can I not know a bit, see a bit?
Can I not glimpse a bit of that which
I fight for, so that I may
Rely less on faith alone?

Last night, I had a terrible vision.
(Maybe it was something I ate,
something I read, something I felt)
But I saw
Broken bodies lined up in bridges, over
Chasms of fire and molten rock.
I sweltered in the suffocating smoke,
Choked on the overpowering stench, the
Constant groaning and moaning, the
Laments that rend the air, and my heart.
This was not some other world, some
Fictional world, some
Past world.
No, this was the present world,
Collapsed, somehow folded up,
Distilled, only making visible that
Which was hidden.

Passing through the fields,
He stopped by the lonely tree,
And tied his horse nearby.

A little further was the hill,
Overlooking the sea,
Green in time gone by.

Dug a hole ten paces west,
Got down on his knee,
Put his hands inside.

Pulled out the box,
Opened it up,
Then sat back and cried.

What's that? A
Glow on the edge, with
Smoke rising cloudward.
Renewed hope,
I trudge forward
Through the waste. Alas,
Disappointment awaits,
Since I have only found the
Sacrificial zone.
Cinders and ashes,
Bone and smoke,
The engines and the
Hidden furnaces where
Our erstwhile
Commodities were
Forged. Now spewing forth
Chaotically, yet no less
Uselessly than before,
While the former things,
Divided and mute,
Serve still to distract.

You tell me this way, I go that.
You ask for this, I give you that.
You say sit, and I then jump.
You say slow, I speed over the bump.
You look down when I look up.
You climb up when I walk down.
You push and shove, I slip right by.
You fly and I crouch near the ground.
You stand at guard, always watching,
Don't bother with it, you won't see me coming.

The walls of my mind,
Resilient to vain hope,
Keep me tied in chains.

I'm in a rush now
I'll regret it very soon
Abysses unfold

Something stirs within the
Imaginary world, and
Through my mind,
Desires, most strongly,
To be born.

Cold waves
Dark clouds
The plants crawling up to me
An island kingdom
Moving rock
Boats setting out to sea

I'm not
Interested in the
People who live their lives
As zombies,
Go to work, go to school, go
Shopping, who live
Without feeling,
Without curiosity.
No, for me, the
Wounded people,
Those who spend their days
In a haze of
Incomprehension, trying to
Come to terms with their
Thoughts, their actions, their
Feelings, which though
Denied, bubble up
Continuously, and sometimes,
Break through.

Wait, I said, what's this?
Haven't I given enough?
No, she said, not yet.

How do I wash myself
Clean of the past that still
Clings to me and makes me
Doubt every action,
Censor every thought,
Freezes the flowing river of
Change into a dull,
Crystalline, still image.

Hey man, you want the money,
Why d'you have to play this game?
Why pretend you don't need it?
Just admit it, you love it,
Love the thought and the feeling of it,
Love the things you'd get,
The way you'd feel,
The way you'd want others to feel.
Why lie to me, why lie to yourself ?
No one's gonna give you a medal,
For persisting in this pretence.
So you better be sure
About what you want,
Or you'll be left, in the end,
With only your holier-than-thou.

She said my sky,
My sky is full of stars.
But look, she said,
I'm looking at them
Through these bars.

Somewhere over there
Lives someone not unlike me,
And I in their head.

The fervent quest I felt I had been on
Reached a desolate dead end.
I cannot see where to go from here.
I fear I must know retrace my steps,
A long way back,
And join the rest
On their well-trodden paths.

I quake with feelings
That I thought were long suppressed
Why do you taunt me?

Do you want to live?
Why, why do you want to live?
Why drag around this piece of meat,
Spending all your energy to keep it
On the brink of death, to keep it
From falling over?

So much unwritten,
So much left inside my mind;
Shall it die with me?

He said, I don't know how
To get unstuck.
She said, the only
Wrong thing is to do
Nothing.

The world, she said, is not coherent,
I do not know what to believe.
I am free, they say, and information
Flows and falls through my sieve.

I once felt as though I caught the world
In a moment when it was off-guard,
When everything seemed inter-connected,
All one -- with nothing to discard.

But that didn't last (what does?), and ever since
As events spin inwards and out,
I journey on, on my long quest
To see what it's all about.

Hey, are we there yet?
The signal is getting weak,
Do you think we're lost?

A strange dance
Of circumstance
I jolt awake,
Revisit the quake
The scene of the crime
Where I made mine
The Great Refusal.

My Facebook feed lies empty,
I have no one to poke.
I took reluctantly to Twitter;
So far it's been a joke!
My Tumblr account was built
From a theme right off the shelf
And I found nothing -- nothing!
When I tried to Google myself.

Below the surface,
A rage, a restless yearning;
For now, the dam holds.

Resentment.
I overflow with it.
I am filled with doubt.
Filled with dread and
Longing.
Which is me and which is other.
I knew only that I had to do
The Right Thing.
I cannot now say
What it was.
Either I must persevere, or
Abandon.
And I cannot choose between them.

I must in secret
Enjoy the compliments to
My doppelgänger.

Come away with me:
The night still holds its kingdom,
We're safe till morning.

The man in gray fled down the street
And I followed, flying low
Until I broken even, then
Gripping him in my talons,
Bore him off towards the pit.
Nearing it, I was ready
To drop him, when
I woke up.

All these blogs and news sites and social networks
Are like a crowded stack of loose, unordered
Books and sheets of papers,
I'll-balanced, towering, quivering,
Ready to bury me under them any moment.

Judging big and small
Is hard to do.
Would you judge by
Fame or fortune? Or by
Their words and deeds?
And what do you really know
Of the latter?

Somewhere it is dark.
I do not want to be there.
I fall into it.

Pick a number,
pick a moment,
pick a memory,
pick a thought.

These are all the same.
There are just as many of each of them.

They are just as close to each other
and just as far apart

Argh! Stop telling me
What to do.
Wait, you're not anymore,
You say ?
You just used to ?
Why am I still doing this then ?
Am I a prisoner to the past ?
Or do I just like it now ?