Grit between your teeth

As the arid air permeates your body;

Poisoned through your lungs,

The Golden -- creeping -- spreads.

A draft will come and sweep

Your withered soul away,

Fallen and returned to dust,

Same fate -- same curse --

All life is burdened with in this miserable land. 

Sterile whites,

Stingingly cold to the touch,

Phosphorescent lights,

Steely and lifeless as the walls they clutch;

Maddening rhythms

Beep long paper-thin nights away,

A wonder we fear them more when they fall,

Quiet, empty and grey.

blanket tents & face masks

They told me to stay inside, so I did.

the truth inside the hardship

longing for freedom

sometimes I feel as if I must break through the fence

that keeps me locked in

I'm sick of staying indoors,

never venturing into the world.

nothing but

emptiness

and boredom

and sometimes fear

but maybe there's something to be gained, after all;

maybe there's a lesson, a truth to be discovered

like a sweet nut kernel

inside its hard shell

sometimes when we can't have what we want

we learn what we could never have dreamed was possible.

an ocean of half-baked dreams 

slowly surely i sink

into subterranean depths, aqueous nebulae of blues and green closing over my head like transparent layers of iridescent silk, or so many glowing jellyfish (like stars; beautiful, but deadly to the touch)

submerged in a dark shadowy underwater universe where everything is blurred and indistinct, vague like amateur polaroids taken with shaky hands, where everything is only half-real, an ocean of half-baked dreams in which i am drowning

in my ocean, i forget who i am & what i'm doing & why it matters -- i cease

i drown myself in distant, distorted sound and unformed, tenebrous images, creating an amnesiac universe where everything is only vaguely real, but where there is none of the constant emotional pain that hangs from the shoulders of the real world like an oversized, threadbare coat in need of

replacement.

i lose myself in the colorless castle,

because i have discovered that my blue is gone and lost forever and i will never find it again,

because it simply

does not exist

-----

this is a weird, gloomy poem that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but here it is anyway :/ 

The words all tumble out,

Snagging on the sharps of my teeth,

All rushing like water from my maw,

Trampling each other on their way from danger.

My words have never flowed, like a river.

They have sputtered and coughed, tasting of dust and sand,

They have climbed, jumbled and knotted like weeds,

They have lingered and hesitated, like a mouse in a plain box. 

So much short of a watery warble, they waste away

And I nip them at the bud, dragging them screaming and crawling

Into the dungeon in which I once was forced to stay.

Stay here.

Stay safe.

Stay out of my way.

Maybe someday you'll be free again.  

Maybe, if only we live to see the day.