My dreams are most vivid when I bolt

Awake staring at the ceiling where the stucco shoots

Constellations to my brain, just a telescope that won’t retract

Or react to the basic instincts meant to drive

Me to paradise, but my vision’s too skewed to read maps and I’m falling

Off a bridge, where I just had to switch the radio station and lost

Control of the red line, my prophet, I tap your shoulder and we swim

Down toward a yellow light that surely indicates heaven, roles reverse

My car that’s still spinning underwater toward the mantle, it abandons

Us and we don’t mind because we’re finally at the great beyond seeking

Stability, but we’re almost home and our lungs feign

Mortal weakness, which is ridiculous because we’re invincible as we dance

Weightless intertwined with sunken dead roots, it’s so easy to believe

That this sensation of asphyxiation is all I need to breathe

Steady here in this bed, when I’m desperate because I’m just hunting

Down escape from all the blazing daggers she hurled last month, when we sang

A sad karaoke duet meant for people who care about each other and I lied

About feeling close in the embrace we knit that night, the darkness builds

Motes around my brain and peace can’t knock the drawbridge down from its hiding

Place, if it even exists, you see I forget what letting go resembles

In the mirror now that my face is shrouded by the red sheets that suffocate

My tear ducts, so I can’t even drain the stress so deeply compressed

In my chest where my heart engorges in fits until madness strangles

Consciousness, who ultimately wins the fight that’s been screaming

Between my ears for weeks at the stroke of the second hand, every hour burns

Me deeper til knives meet vessels and all the surges of blood coagulate

In clogs, making me a cog in the wheel that stopped turning

Long ago, on a planet where I used to flip my eyeballs backward and smile

Warmly like the morning sun that back then, I used to meet with surprise.