Some, life burns, some it saves,
Though we're all just corpses looking for our graves.
Tender petals brace as the north wind blows,
But why and to what we cling on to, no-one knows.

When do you wake? When do you cry?
Is it both by yourself? What colour's your sky?

Do you still stare at the wall in your room?
Does it stare back in lamplit gloom?

When do you smile that smile that I knew?
Do you know, do you care that it rains here, too.

What do you think? What do you do? When you're being yourself and not being you.

Are you feeling the cold, with the nights drawing in - with leaves piled in corners and the sun getting thin?

When do you smile that smile that I knew?
Do you know, do you care that it rains here, too?

I dream and when I dream, you are sometimes there.
You did not die.
Instead we talk of how scared we were that you would not make it through.
How it was a terrible time for all of us
But now things are back to normal.

It seems right and not strange at all that you are part of things as ever you were.
But this is a dream, though I do not know it,
I never do.
Only when I wake, does all the sense turn to nonsense
You did die. I did lose you.

But I grasp the notion that these dreams are perhaps a way of telling me that somehow you do survive.
And somewhere round the corner just ahead and out of view, you are.
One day dreams will be and I shall wake from waking.

Here I stand, inside the close and turning walls,
Balancing my humours against the seasons,
Hoping against the tide that blood will beat the brood.
But I can see dogs on the Ferris Wheel
And I know there will be torches in the town.
So I will remain here,
Inside the close and turning walls.

Almost all of the time, I do not notice it.
I distract myself unconsciously
And carry on.
I am me and all the people that others know me to be.
I smile and laugh and make amusing comments to make others laugh.
I maintain connections.
But every so often, I catch a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, of the figure crouching to hide in the dark corner of the room. Any room.
And then, almost never, I stare, to try and see his face.

Humanity, in all its dreadful shades,
Shall shuffle and leap to its varnished doom.
It shall grind and break its very bones in selfie congratulatory glow;
A sickening dance of death,
Salty and twisted and sweet.
Tear-stained and hating, it claws the wall as the stairs fall towards the blank.
Laugh in fear, embrace yourselves and believe that we are climbing,
Whilst onwards, onwards unto the abyss.