Sitting here,
Tied to my chair,
Lashed with commands,
Controlled...
Filling with a desire to escape,
To free myself,
Finding freedom inside...

Imagination is my kingdom, my escape, and they call me mad,
This world blackens my senses,
Reality is a delusion,
My mind is reality,
Threatening to drift away into madness...
Or they call it madness anyway.

This cage, this prison cell, this classroom...
This grimy hole in which I stand,
Feeling them force their thoughts into my mind,
Unwillingly accepting the ****...
Watching them bleach and scrub my brain,
Painting it with ignorance,
Covering it in a veil,
My senses are gone,
I only see black,
Through a world of cold numeric displays,
Charts, and blank readouts dominate the sky,
Beauty is lost,
My mind is gone.

My tongue is charred
on the planes of your chest;
fingers seared from tracing the
patterns in your skin.
Forest-fires spark between us.
The hairs on my arms are long burnt away.

You exhale.
Your breath is smoke and I gladly breathe it in.
My lungs survive.
Later the doctors will be amazed that I
lived as long as I did.

We leave no ashes.
The flames are too high.

And yet–

Nothing matches the fires inside,
where new suns are born
every time you speak.
Words drip like diamonds from your lips,
but I love the frogs and maggots too.

My plates are shifting.
The internal landscape speaks for itself:
I listen
to seismograph readouts,
details of soil composition and
tidal patterns,
and hear your breath
in every charted line.