“On the Shores of Madness”

Peeking at the world through closed fingers

I glimpsed the horrors that hide in plain sight

Finding doubt where hope still lingers

Tracking scars from an ongoing plight

Madness approaches on the tips of its toes

Creeping around on all fours

It sews its seeds where fear still grows

Leaving refuse scattered along its shores

Madness closes in like a sleuth in the night

It slips down dark corridors

Straining hope like a sieve and replacing it with fright

Like mischievous foes in shadowy corners

Something lurks in forbidden places

Secret figures that creep in our dreams

They’re all that remain of familiar faces

Forever trapped in eternal screams

— David Allen

“A Stranger Unto Me”

I thought she was an angel

But I had the wrong address

As above, so below

And I’m sure you know the rest

I had planned never to speak of her again

So many words have I wasted on her

So many emotions, too

“Never again,” I told myself

And yet, here I am, once again

Stuck in this endless dance with you

If the mind is an uncharted labyrinth

Then surely the heart is a library of mysteries

A conundrum within a paradox

Like a soul without a body

Lost amongst the reeds of despair

Adrift in a sea of imagination

What secrets await us at the end of our journey?

What keys will the universe reveal?

There must be a vault where I store all my thoughts

But I’ve somehow forgotten to lock it

I left myself open for all to see

And the code is now lost to me

She too will someday be foreign, you see

Speaking in a language I care not to learn

She’s like an incomplete thought to me now

A sentence unreadable

Scrambled and unintelligible

A contradiction of herself

And with a tiny nod, I was poured another drink

Then the barkeep in the trashy coat and uneven tan said,

“This is how it all began.”

And with a shifty wink and a feigned smile, I replied,

“And this is how it all shall end,” I lied

Our chapter may be at an end

But fiction can always have a sequel

And then…

We were strangers once again

— David Allen