With my face drained of colour

and my brain of blood

like Billy Budd

I'm lashed to the grating;

with senses growing duller

and with quaking heart

I make a start

at temperature equating

and my lungs suck useless air.

Like paraplegic dancers

in format

ion team

my understanding seems

hiidebound in its movements,

contemplating answers

that could break my bonds--

to be half wrong

would be, in me, improvement...

but my comprehensive faculties are impaired.

And it seems absurd, but now all I've heard

f

ades in empty words and is worthless

as the Human Laugh rocks the cenotaph

but the joke is half-true, and mirthless.

Trying to trace a reason

from the spinning words

but all I've heard

seem at odds with their meanings,

phonetically pleasing

but deliv

ered in such haste

that in their place

my mind commences screaming.

On the verge of belief I crash onto the reef

and a cynical thief steals my senses,

so I cling to the pew with dimensions askew,

and recognition refuses present tenses.

All the lives

of the saints demonstrate that my faint

is a minor complaint, but the end is

nowhere in sight,

why can't I find me a way to go?

I don't want to die in the nave,

but I know it may be with me some day

so I've got to find a way I can save up

my evergies, and find a cause to pray

so something for something

to which I can give my creed...

I'd gladly succumb to the wave,

if I thought the water taught a way to light;

I'd gladly succumb--I'm not brave,

and it's easy to believe what the preacher says

except for the conflict raging between my head

and my brain.

I don't want to die, but