The motion pictures
are in the solitary entertainment of clouds
when the sky’s frayed mental edges
are amorphous to the days
floating away over a sea of cracked mirrors.
Your quarters are perched
like a giant bat
spreading its wings over the grounds
opening like a cavity
that the mind could not hope to cover
with anxiety, harnessed tightly to time.
Creativity, like a haphazard design
of submerged stones suggest
there is a wellspring of words to be mined.
Smooth as ivory
soft and pliant
as the soul of this enterprise,
where unseen hands
thread the scent of nocturnal flowers
through the sterile sanitarium
of sleeping senses.
The moving eyelids
molding dreams into compliance
that by morning a last sprinkle of moonlight
finds its way through the ward,
softening the last layer of night
for those who cannot shake it off with sleep.
This temporary reprieve
from the pervasive melancholy underneath
the loss of landmarks and
the inverted water sense of falling,
the sound of an ocean sucking
at all the shrinking spaces
peeling walls fit the places
that always seem to close in.
From a prominent house on the hill
there is no view
of the crumbling piers of childhood
or any of your dead peers
wheeled through underground tunnels,
the derelict images are only a mirage
in the fog of medication.
The breaks in the trees
were a temporary release
from a deeper foray into the past
where, on illuminated tracks,
memories are speeding
between leather mills
and over cast iron bridges
suggesting escape
but merely a ruse
for a one way trip
terminating at asylum station.
The darkened stairways
to the uppermost recesses of fear
neatly arranged in a natural setting,
the clinically deranged put through
harsh routines of forgetting.
All of the windows have eyes
all of the glass fragments of the sky
getting shattered beneath
the weight of reflection.
From this vantage, some see nothing
while others cling to visions
like fire escapes outside of gothic prisons.
Some are destined to fall
while others hold on to the hope
of some form of elevation
vacillating between the glass of the ground
and the effervescent clouds
that pass above without a sound.
yakskinpocketnotes 