A Cloud-formed Teardrop Asylum

Tired souls hunched in familiar bricks

Drowned in sleeping sickness silver skeleton palace of mist

Heart-shaped carnival of sores locked up in cupboard doors

Looking up at the starry sky won’t make your scarred life

Light up bright

A thirst for questions have their black reply --

Hide in cloud-mouthed skyscraper

Haven for no thoughts but mine

A muscular memory of February

When proud absence left me

(We are alone amongst millions…)

Subway stations filled with forced equations for my earth to burst

The retina is so hungry I could eat a hearse

Peeling adverts perfumed with roman numerals

As we shuffle off to our jobs like funerals

Drawn by wounds to the throat of ghosts

(We) lost our way back to the vault of youth

Codes forged in my minerals when the earth grew old

Love’s labours lost back when lives for lies were sold (our lives were sold)

Kodak coloured souvenirs

From a furnished furnace of fears

For learning to be mad

Is the poverty of happiness

And I know that it is clear

That I’m not here

In this cloud-formed invisible asylum of tears

I am ready to face my fears

As my consciousness disappears

To the internal sanctuary of seers

Where the clouds last for years & years

“I placed a blue death mask there in my book of hours

that those who dream of an earthly paradise may read it as men”