Beauty is the fleeting look
The Alabaster skin
In the night black dress
For a gentle touch
For an evening caress
Lie with me beauty
and sleep

Do you know?

I walked in the dark. The shadows clung to me like a lover. I knew nothing but the mood around me, a sullen small death dancing in the back of my mind. I could feel that breath on my neck, that breath of my unknown, unseen stalker. There was no-one in the room with me,I knew that, I was alone. Yet still I felt the presence, it walked through my dreams at night, it followed the ghosts of my waking mind and whispered in their ears telling them my secrets.

I was never alone now, for some weeks, the presence had watched. At first it was a breeze, a childs laugh. It hid behind a thousand voices each separate and distinct yet it was there. The more I heard it, the clearer it became. I did not hear the words more the intention, the animus of the concious creature. I name it 'Audience', for it watches me, yet does not connect, does not interact. It just sits and reacts.

Perhaps it is just paranoia has set in. Perhaps I have lost that paper-thin tenuous connection with reality. Have I tumbled into the deep hole of some underlying madness. Can I trust my senses? Am I really here, now, in the dark with my stalker I name 'Audience' or do I lie alone unattended and forgotten. In an asylum, a hospital for the criminally insane. Am I watching this world through a window in my fractured mind. How could I know, how could I tell.

I turn my head quickly once, twice. Perhaps I will see the real world buried there in the blur of my peripheral vision. There just on the very edge, is that a figure. Perhaps a Doctor stands over my bed looking down taking notes on my shattered personality laid clear before him.

Is that the truth or just another layer of the onion skin of my delusion. Is that figure really a doctor or is it my Audience visible in the folds of reality. I do not feel mad but yet again how could I judge. Who is the mad man to truly judge his own mental state. Shouldn't I cry, scream, tear out my hair, Is that not madness? I am calm my mind feels clear. Yet still it follows. It could not happen, some unknowable intelligence following me, watching me. It is just white noise, It is nothing, a waking nightmare.

And yet I know somewhere there is a breath and an eye. The same somewhere where the impossible things happen. That place where nightmares live. That place, that primordial darkness where fear comes from. All it takes or took to get from where we live to there. The space the pressure of a single breath or the fall of an eyelid.

And into somewhere the universe blinks.

 I have often wondered

I have often wondered
In the deep nights
When the sky falls
And the nightmares come
I have often wondered
At the head on the stake
The blood on the walls
Where the Demons walk

I have often wondered
When the freeze descends
So follow the monkey men
And the chaos reigns

I have often wondered
Hell may come yet
The spawn may flow
Someday it will all end

I have often wondered
But why, oh why...
...are people...
...SO VERY STUPID

 Beneath the Sycamore Tree

The birds and flowers they sang to me
As i walked 'neath the bows of the sycamore tree
A light refreshing rain soaks my skin
I was washed in the flow and made whole again.
The lights they flowed from bird to bee
In the soft light, in the warm rain,
'neath the sycamore tree.

Once my lady i did seranade thee
With light voice and warm heart
'neath the sycamore tree.

Once we walked and we were made free
in the thin light of a late night
'neath the sycamore tree.

We loved as the angels wild, unendingly
On the brown leaves, on an autumn day
'neath the sycamore tree

Now I leave you my love to sleep deep
with my heart stole, in a cold hole.
'neath the sycamore tree.

When the world ends.

When the world came to an end. We sat in a circle each looking out to what remains. We each saw ourselves mirrored in the destruction, the burning world around us. Our reflections bade us pause in our thoughts. Awareness soaked into us in the light of the fires around. We each of us lost in the moment.

So we have come to this. Just the very few staring back to where we had been who we had been. I myself looked with now unblinkered eyes to what was inside. My devils danced in those fires. All the bad thoughts those I cheated those I hurt. I stare and I cry for who I was. Most of all though I see all the many choices I didnt make. The girl I never kissed, the hand I never held. My heart broken again and again by words unspoken. My eyes sought without my volition my every hurt given or recieved. Every broken promise from a dead world.

I realised as I viewed the worst of who I had been that I did not cry. I could not cry for the sins of the man I had been as much as they hurt. I could not cry because the vacuum I had come to inhabit would not allow the hurts to touch. Instead they drift around me like snowflakes in the wind. They flow around me always moving but never falling. Never feeling there cold kiss on my skin.

So we sit in our circle each of us in our own world. Our pasts holding us in this place. We cannot escape its pull. Its painful magnetism appeals to the masochist deep in me. Im rooted here hooked to the pain of a lost world. How long I have sat here I am unaware. It may be a day it may be eternity. All I know is I can never leave, We can never leave. this is our world now. The memories are not what we were but what we are. Memories, just memories.

Second String

Not quite the guy you mean
Not the one you put on the team
Just out of sight
Im playing to the right

Im your second string

The words you read
They werent my tread
You looked at me next
After the guy you text

Im your second string

After you met the band
That was me in the stands
I watched while they played
And the future was laid

Im your second string

You kissed the boys
In the summers joys
You made me cry
Watch my red eyes

Because im your second string
Always your second string