They say demons should be
                                                               exorcised
They say in the dark lurks
                                                               evils
They say in your soul 
should be nothing but
                                                               light
That washed out is better 
than chiaroscuro.
They say all these 
                                                               things
But what do they know,
these people who live in the grey?
My muses are demons
My pen is a knife
My life is much
                                                               better
With black ink in my
                                                               veins
I suppose if their minds were to
                                                               open
We'd all be exactly the same;
A world full of demon filled people
With eyes open
                                                               wide
Drawing beauty from shade.

Lost in my chiaroscuro world
I cannot be followed
No-one knows my secret language
No-one knows my passwords
or my frames of reference
Everything said, is coded.

In desperate times
speech becomes pure sound
rhythmic and completely foreign
People can make out words
but they have no context

George, Jean, Martin
Arthur, Margaret
Names like rays on a compass
They were my world
of visible magnetic forces
I could no more abandon them
than rearrange the continents.

But you can learn
when the old geography
is too painfully familiar
not to abandon it
But simply invent
a country of your own.

A landscape beyond maps,
compasses and sextant
Beyond a dictionary
of common usage
and invented diction.

You can search
but the unseen
patterns of dreaming
are as easy to find.

Isolated, distant
language fractures
and returns to you
words are breaking the barrier reef
an exile in a shadow land.

The damage grows inside
sensed but unseen
seeping into crevices like moss
and lichen gripping
spreading and creeping
a spiked vine
flaring down to the tongue.


© M.L.Emmett