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sleeping beside
a man breathing
wildly awake,
he speaks in the dark from the bottom of
the most bottomless place

questions asked in the dark
we lose sight
we get lost
scared by what we find

daylight has direction,
or rather,
you can see what to avoid,
a fork in the road and we always go right
til we're left with nothing but

why

in the middle of the night

Mistress seems strange,
Taught to read lines,
A voice, practiced, undermines
A mistake, replaced, small change,
Out of Their pockets into silver sockets that
Shine when it Rains.

She's under a roof,
Need not,
want not,
the handful of proof,
That when the crowd gets loud,
They paint her Red,
But the Stage paints her White.

Mistress seems different,
Trained to believe, to perform,
Playing the part was significant.
Ignore the cracks,
a pleased crowd comes back and
She'll get her pay, so long as
She sticks to the way she was raised.

She found the trapdoor.
It led to the boy whose fingers
Were scored from
Scripts he'd never written.
He spoke off cue,
though she thought him kind,
There was salt in his wounds.

He capsized the boat.
A stage that'd been sailing,
but barely afloat.

Mistress is gone.
Her life turned around,
As she took the hand of the boy,
who promised she wouldn't drown.

He works in a building with many windows, but no exits. ??

There is a box for everyone. ?
Coffee is served at 9, black. ?
Printers scan the same papers,?
making copies, and copies, and copies?
of rewritten words. Rewritten ?by men in the same suits.  ??

The light is white. ?
The sun does not come through windows, black. ?
Plastic plants are dying beside colorless walls.

But late at night, ?when the boxes are empty, ?
and the moon comes through windows, silver. ?
Beside the plants, he’ll paint a creature on the wall?
big enough to make its own exit. ?
And away they go.