What do Daisies know of Hell?

I’ll always be the skeleton in your closet
The Minotaur, roaming the fevered labyrinth
Of your psyche
I’ll haunt the fleecy, foam-embellished shore
Of your solemn, sunken isle – a weeping diamond in the feral dawn
Bejewelled.
Intangible as the delicate magic that shimmers and breathes
Behind my television screen.

Through an ice-edged lens, we exchange…
A single glance
You keenly exhibit the frozen smile
Of a man who has forgotten how to cry
Anything, to paint a new history
Anything to forget.
I’ll cram our dirty memories into a red velvet clutch-bag
And stride indifferently from your side
(Although I seem to have misplaced
My legs…and…
My soul.)
Knocking aside the cobwebs, and the dust-riddled past
I ignore the tangled shoals of stars, glistening behind your eyes
Tears, faded as the newly risen dead

You always were like television, to me
Casting the world into sharp, sharp focus.
Bringing life closer to my eyes – dragging it further from my soul
“Oh, you occupied my time…”
You live for dreams, and so you live not at all.
Constructing shrines to the deity of soap opera
My face, lost
In the shadows of time
Begone, my dear. Paradise beckons
Heaven is no more than a trendy Parisian café
(I’d never fit in…)
And God – God is a pavement artist
A long-haired student with nothing better to do.
Plucking dreams from the air, drunk on the pungent wine of righteousness
(We built ourselves a tyrant, and a shattered morgue to house the living)
The perils of the future can so easily be ignored
But there is no escape
When the phantoms lie within.

Your embrace is a taut gallows loop
(Though it speaks of other things:
Of magic-carpet clouds, tormenting a silver savannah sky,
Swallow-tailed standards, wrinkling in the cool alabaster dizziness
Of innocence.)
And now, one last daisy blooms
Twining itself (serpentine) about the frigid machine’s heart
Inside my television
Unfurling sweet and slow as syrup – a comb-fringed head rearing
Colder than Empyrean
Brighter than a sea of vacant celebrity smiles
I’m lost, tangled, disparate…
Shackled to your dreams
And I can’t change
The channel.