They’re like a smoke that rises from a corner of your mind
Filling your entire head in such an unhurried flow
And you inhale the scent in gulps, in gulps
dazed and intoxicated, you drown in it.
You’d look into a pair of fawn eyes
that belong to a grown man—
the throne bearer of your kingdom of red.  
Fawn eyes, for they really are wide, innocent and bright
pouring out a flood of sunlight, an eternity of thriving life
The man, himself is real
a renaissance sculpture come to life,
the undoubting incarnation of the youthful Adonis.
You’d look into those gleaming eyes and for a moment
you feel their presence, you see love
You’re subtly tricked into feeling real emotions
in the face of the imaginary
They play with your thoughts, your flesh
until you part your lids and find
that the dream is here, the man is not.
So you wipe all the unrequited foolishness from your eyes
and unwillingly face the weight of reality.
Until the ghost reappears
and breathes that poison smoke back into your mind

And oh, how skillful he is! Oh, how cunning!
OH, HOW RADIANT THE SUN, IN THE WORLD OF DREAMS!

[Lub-dub,
lub-dub,
lub-dub,
lub-dub…]

[Breathe in… breathe out...
breathe in… breathe out…]

What awaits outside the eyelid dulls to dust in comparison—
The echo of silence for a friend,
the blemishes in the blood aching again
At the contact of the emptiness, the life
the fugitive escapes back into her dreamland.
Where she once lived in a foreign land
a thriving adolescence she lived within the walls of her mind
far away from the voids that mangled her childhood.
She once loved a man from that land
who ghosted inside her mind for years
In bleeding crumbs of reality
he sometimes appeared
but always, always to carelessly disappear
back into the million mile reverie.

Dreamland, O dreamland!
That grew up with me
inside my mind, inside my heart, so solitary
Now, a grown woman,
I still feed on your company
And I wait, I wait, I wait
for a true world as homely as my dream...