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 formation 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
	fades 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 delivered 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 just the same--
		some day....

Waiting for that moment
	that I know will come
	when I'll have to run
and find another sermon...
Everyman and Norman
	and the talking priest--
	still, I am at least
holding all the doors open.
Inside me all outside is shared.

	As the cracked bells peal it all seems unreal
	but the seventh seal stays unbroken
	and the Offertory plate tenders no escape--
	still I refuse to scrape up a token
	of esteem for these false
	alleyways of the course;
	I must try to divorce sense from sensing.
		Tell me again,
		tell me the way to go.

So when I talk to myself
although I take good care to listen
my heart grows ever more faint--
	there's something missing?

-----------------------