Welcome to the Fall;
of Autumnal reverie-overloads
like power spikes
and psychotropic nightmares
that batter repression-memories
into open-air ritual sacrifice
upon neuron altars.

The dense mornings
suffocate lungs
like ashen drifts:
cut the air with knives
pulled from my back
and save your sentences
for judgement; these words
will out ’afore I bleed dry
and fail like the forests,
leaves fluttering to ground-
zero as torn pages
of condemned paper.

My fear of change
changed everything.
Paths led down through
ever-decaying dead-end
rooms, stocked to ceilings
with detritus-distractions
from this incubating isolation:
fragile personae crack like
the spine of books which
crash to barren Earth…

Enough. Spool this
downed reel onward;
click forwards through
fractured frames in
stop-start animation,
one shot at a time.

Take the dreams
I saved and
sear them with the stories;
personal effects effloresce
with fiction in the flames,
reduced to nothing in
the sullen half-light.

This is October,
and those are the storm-crows
circling the deadwood.

It’s not enough.