Flickerings of distant memories flutter
past my psyche into nothing.
Through an astral plain I drift.
Over nonexistent lands
my feet carry me, floating.

She slinks away, the black cat, agile—
“The dreamscape is a fragile
thing,” she said. I'm following,
changing, borrowing her shape but then
the story fades, too vague
and just like that
it's vanished.

Incomprehensible images wander
as clouds through skies of colours unseen.
I'm lost in an ocean of questions
that pierce my ears as hooks through the fish's mouth
but I cannot ask,
for a white hot zipper seals my lips.
A voice whispers, breath damp in my ear:
“Watch, listen...”

The ground opens beneath me
and I plummet.
Feeling cold against my skin
I'm naked, vulnerable, fearful.
This pit must be bottomless but
I've landed, unscathed.
Bathed in grasses soft as silk
smelling of life and freedom
I'm enveloped in relief, protection.

My body moves, uncontrollable
as reeds in a river
yet still guided by a wind with no origin
playing melodies of beauty immense and painful.

Wonder fills me as the song ends,
ominous and heavy the silence looms.
Flowers die and the grasses wither
as I'm pulled away,
reluctant.

Higher, higher I'm lifted
into lucidity
past ladders and staircases, tunnels and gateways
closing before my eyes
as nearer draws the moment I dread more than anything.
Despite my persistence,
I'm solid again.
I'm myself, mundane and mourning:
awake.

I can recognize that sound,
The aching whispers that bubble out of a million starving souls
As their bodies wilt back into the earth.

Can you hear it,
The parroted anguish of these once-bright spirits?

It could appear that our generation is lost,
Caught up in the romantic notions of wanderlust and self,
Distancing ourselves as we cry out and clutch the echoes.

Will you listen as they confess their sins,
Drawn kicking and screaming from their throats?

You spilled incarnadine

across dirt floor

grainy crystals and flecks of

stone that turned to mud

sunk deep to worms

and roots of trees

that drank your stain

and

turned thin-veined leaf

shy pink until rain

came and

saturated dew

carried you away to

white clouds lost

in the perfect sky.

The harmonica is a brushed-steel magazine
a little chrome home for a loaded line of tones
like bullets begging to be drawn
through the barrel of a handgun
the cold friend I holster
hidden in my pocket
and some final night it will find me alone
where I can pull it to my teeth
and with a single squeeze
I can blow the silence straight from my skull.

Words, words, words
Packaged and distributed
To the masses,
Recycled cliché stories
Of lost youth and love,
Recycled morals to feed
Into the classes,

The mind becomes an animal,
A phrase-spitting monster,
Aiming for guts of steel,
Fragile hearts,
And alcoholic tendencies,

I’m painting metaphors
For your solitary demise,
I’m splashing paint
Across your solitary disguise,
Unveiling caged wings,
Only to become
Another joke in the crowd,
A well-paid clown in an office,
A romantic artist with eyes in the sky,

I have become another starving predator,
In an over-occupied jungle
Of laptops and caffeine.

I've heard it's about control
sounds simple

I'd control myself in shops
sustained by other people's greed
                           temptation
             hunger
that croissant's half fat that
caesar-salad dressing       oily depths
of calories

this pineapple is my five a day
my first my last
vulture-gripped and smuggled home
brown paper bagged

at my desk I'd lose control
cutting in ahead of schedule
tearing an espresso spoon
through fibrous sinew gorges
                                                   hunched
hacking into flesh

until I'd hollowed out
scraped off every scrap
and filled myself with bile

I ice-skated for hours that day
blisters on my fingers from the spoon
round and round