Don’t make these dark places your home.
Stars swim and drown
in the midnight depths of your eyes.
I drag that sky like the ocean, searching to find.
But you’re lost beneath a shivering tide.
Stranded inside a shape of flesh and vice.
And like the ocean, it’s so deep.
Surrender soon gives way to sleep.
But haunted and tangled are my dreams.
Because your best interest I failed to keep.
This haunted is so ill-defined;
a malady of the mind
you catch in the corners of your eye,
plagued to relive the nightmares till you die.
Centripetal strain condemns living to repeat.
Dead on our feet, solace is our sleep.
But sleep is breached, and there comes a shriek
rising hot behind the prison of gritted teeth.
These broken hands oft fail to reach.
No more can pretense mar my speech.
My fault wrought everything you are.
Every wound, every scar. Sinking softly into self,
eternities from my touch. Near but so far.
And my mind itches to kill the life support.
But murder is too heavy a weight.
So I leave you to fight your incorporeal
civil war, and soldier on despite your hate.
The tide is black now, a gentle decay.
Long to scream it all away.
But vocal cords break and mute you’re left,
with darkness cold to paint your breath.
An empty shell, victim to theft.
With a heart the color of slow death.
And starving strides and deepening clefts.
Perhaps more room to fit inside.
But shallow is this fallow pain,
a gallow walk of weary strain.
Pulls you soft unto the earth,
craving now a steeled rebirth
to bring you home again.
The prism spins in dizzied time.
Killing self with words sublime.
Hands pressed hard to the surface,
suspended in the murky
waters of your own mind.
My lullaby you fail to hear.
Pleas for freedom miss your ear.
Bleeding and spangled you hang your head
from the other side of the mirror.