Let me fall back into your heart,
And lie besides you
On this purple, diamond sea.

Let me unpeel your skin from your bones
And find again the love within you,
Running blue against your wrists.

Let me still visit like an old friend,
There to protect you
From those burning sienna skies.

Let me take from you the bottle, the dagger too,
For I will not let you
Lose yourself on these frothy, hemlock waves.

Let me, though I am dead, still beat in your heart,
For I will not leave you,
Until you too are ready depart.

The morning smelt like one of those lost summers,
those bright mornings I remember as a child
before I understood beauty.
It tasted like the cool milk I’d sipped on the cusp of a promising day,
when the stern rebukes of my father could not dim
the power of the blue sky to lift my spirits.
Sadness barely grazed my knees as I walked on the dewy grass
for everything was a masterpiece I'd never examined properly.
The air was warm and golden,
and I was the knight or the lost hero and the afternoon was
set to be filled with imagination and friendships
that I clasped so dear.
But we were sitting on the wall of the Garden of Eden,
looking in and drinking in its beauty, but knowing,
behind us that a dark fiend lurked,
yet never minding to turn around to look properly.
It was when who we were was not quite tangible,
when the light softened the whirling confusion of growing and forming
and we could smile and laugh
and think never mind tomorrow, it's today.
Yes, for a moment, the morning smelt like a lost summer,
so quickly fleeting.

You sleep in shudders,
In thundestorms and clouds,
You dwell in nightmares,
Unseen demons,
Wrapping you in shrouds.

You talk like madness,
You raise up ghosts,
You fear the monsters
Of children’s dreams,
Ever but feebly engrossed.

I hide your fears,
Behind closed doors,
I bring back summer in poems and
Repeat your favourite words;
An attempt to soothe the angered sores.

I fill others with your own lies,
A promise of better days,
Of words written in your own hand.
I deceive them of my cares,
Protecting your mind’s maze.

But still there are unhealed scars,
Quiet whispers and silent sighs
And I wish I could ease you
Into one night of rest,
If you could just close your eyes.

Skin as pale as lilies,
     now livid with interrupted bloom.
Bruises as dark as that Irish lake,
     five of them, of a brutish nightshade hue.
Body as limp as the towel they used to rub you warm to no avail,
     dotted over with dirt, your shirt torn through.
Eyes as vacant as the echo in a tomb,
     once blue before, now glazed over with vitreous dew.
Oh Clerval, how I have forsaken you.