To lie sleeping through each day for reasons best known to myself
Would be pacifying, restful but still ultimately wrong;
Could embarrass all my colleagues who would one by one retreat
From such a wreck, this shrivelled speck of ruinous deceit.

To stand staring at the ladies who stride by me in the circus
Would be painfully invasive, spectatorially weird.
Yet childlike stares and lonely cares are all I understand somehow.
So standing, staring soulfully is all that I have planned right now.

To sit mourning for a soulmate who despaired and left his soul behind
Would get me nowhere slowly but the scars would boast his memory.
I'd like to think his spirit still survives somewhere inside my brain,
Perhaps the bit that worries, cares and tries to not complain.

To crouch in timid desperation under uninviting walls,
Could see me weep before a sleep eventually seizes me.
But slumber's fickle single room would tickle my unstable gloom
Until a crashing nightmare threw me over, to my doom.

To hide behind my only friend, whose wounds I'll never know to mend,
Would not be unexpected, more predictable in failure.
But still in her a spark may crackle hopefully, or pleadingly
To one day light from darkest night the path where she's been leading me.

To howl yearningly to sunburnt moons, or squat, embracing dismal tunes,
Would get me where I am today: to squalid dungeons, locked by day.
And though I know there's care out there, I mostly sit and blindly swear
That no-one there can touch me here: there's no-one who would dare.

To fly singing to the heavens, laughing lullabies of endless joy
Would be achieving grace at levels way beyond my dreams.
Yet in those dreams, where nothing seems to let me learn to fly
I feel I can, I know I want, to float above my endless sighs.

To stagger alcoholically from homely house to spartan flat
Would exercise me thoroughly, perhaps demolishing some fat
But nothing seems to help in working off the lard around my brain
So staggering from wall to wall is all I'm managing again.