Time has flown from me
Like some archaic lark
Whose mourning song recalls
The memories that I've forgotten.
It climbs above the spindly skeletons
As winter's days toll on,
Counted like the nickels strewn over the backseat
And lost to the very breaths of all the world.

She writes what she sees
And what she sees is what things are.
She's the funhouse mirror
And distortion clings to the reflection.
She writes everything
Especially what she sees.

My thoughts run circles,
My thoughts run knots.
Tangled masses that can never be undone.
I've lost the one thing that ever mattered,
To a ravaged soul that couldn't define anything-
Not even itself.
That this is what she writes is one thing,
That this is how I am is another.

The lines were blurred,
The borders broken by a thousand years of turmoil,
Never to be reinstated.
The cheeks are turned without knowledge of what they are turned to,
And my jaw clenches,
Wired shut by all things that I'll never say.

Sickness is a burden,
But illness is a plague.
Drag one foot in front of the other
Trotting the caked grains of million year old memories.
They known mine are missing
And they offer theirs.
Walk until I lose the road,
Falling at the edge.

On my knees I've knelt since it all left,
With an engulfing, enflaming, desire...
And the question of origin.
Does she write that it was founded?
Self destruction amplified by desperation?
Or martyr with a flair for the dramatic?

The lines were grains pushed back in depression's flood,
And now that I need them they are gone.
My time, my patience, my vision, my hope, my faith, my belief.
They are gone.
They drift in someone else's mind,
Someone I long to be again.
They hum to her, tell her everything's going to be alright,
Hold her tighter than glue, not wavering,
Not a single thought of my misfortune.

The mirror cracks into diamonds
That rain over the rough surface of the asphalt
And what used to be fizzles to nothing more than a memory,
Flown away on the wings of my memory lark,
Mourning everything I was,
Regretting everything I am,
And knowing,
That as I kneel here,
Lost to the world and isolated by an invisible wall,
I will never hear it again.

This is the end:
Dust-caked knees,
Tear-streaked cheeks,
Spinning consciousness,
Desolation,
Desperation,
And an acid-white needle
Just inches from the fingertips
As the head hits the ground.

Overhead,
As it flies,
The lark never looks back.
It knows better.