The rat:
the beast so vile
That filth that coats my mind,
In the back, like some cracked tile.
I passed the Stacked earth like a map pile.
These are Mad trials, yet
Glass vials of smiles,
Unabashed, I clashed against the profile.
But who made it with that style?

I walked on for endless miles.
The way was Lit up with candles, and a path to guide was laid in the fabric
of my mind. A track with No handles, and a drop from an endless high.
Light was anything but an object but neither was I.

Standing on the boundary between that one and this child,
Was a ghostly goat eating the flesh of time, as I passed, he howled out a ghastly cry, as if he was the baby, and I was the wild.
The child reached for me,
spoke mutely
With the voice of the dumb, and  pointed to the Edge.
“Run.”
A thousand steps,
a cadence,
a vision of a tree full of plums, with no voice, I heard a song impossibly sung,
A sound so primal, like beating drums.
With each step of my legs as they swung, my flesh began to burn.

Pain, in it’s belly I churned, For always, like a beast with a curse.
I pulled myself from agony’s lungs to be spat out, apt, yet undone.
And began to walk again as if I were young.
But everything felt like age, the scent of dying wood, or the drying veins beneath the elder’s hood.

I turned by the orchard to find nothing there, but an empty table with seventeen Silver chairs, and crystal ball slivers suspended in the air: The shards of a memory left empty and bare.
No portions or potions, just power and a Carpenter’s square.

I was a foreigner, lost somewhere.

The leaves that had painted the scene
Became a garnet vanir.
And the idea of peace came clear.
It was something, someone, somewhere other than here.

“Is there any place other than here?”