I.
Ceiling fan

As I wander this empty house
With sins piling up on my mind
I gaze at the trees rustling in silence
While the sun beats down coldly
The wind drags ice hands across my face
And the ground trembles slightly
I lay on my couch and watch the ceiling fan spin
Around into a mystical circle
The dust settles in a myriad of shapes
And the inky black lake outside
Spirals in ouroboros
The sky is a vortex tonight
Inside, shadows are projected by flickering lights
And dance on the walls
And suddenly the world, with all its ambient peace
Its tiny battles and conflicts, its Sisyphean exercises in life and death and rebirth
Its everlasting entropy that wraps around us with loving arms
Turns grey and sideways and skewed and cold and dissonant
And utterly boring
And I'm left unable to distract myself from my own emptiness
The skin on my body folds into sharp corners
Daydreams taste sour
I spin around on the ceiling, lazy as a river

II.
Crawl Space

Love, and the world turns into colour too soon
Loquacious silence claims liquid deserts in monsoon
Smoke rising over scenic vistas and oceanic plateaus
The faint eerieness of the hills bid me adieu  
I'm freefalling again as I wander these empty hallways
The wind daydreams between my fingers and weaves into the curls of my tangled hair
Everything is a dark spiral
I'm hazily descending into the depths, stumbling awkwardly
The wintery embrace of the water wraps around my skin and chills me to the bone
The vivid blue stings into my eyes and worms its way into my brain
The walls are closing in around me
Waves of self obsession enclose me and drag me further
Self pity is a riptide
It's sands are filling my mouth like an hourglass
Tick tock, the mechanical pendulum swings back and forth
Across molten, half formed thoughts and angular dissonance
My pen numbly punches through my skin and I bleed the dark ink of my poetry
And float
drifting slowly
Quietly humming

I disassemble.

Breathe in breathe out

You magnify every meaning my life could ever have
The heart swoons and sighs and brain demons and blood arrows
The Elysian fields to rest in peace
And the Tartarus darkness to rest in pieces
Fatality that beckons with a bony finger
And fate that smiles kindly at my self obsession
I found you and I'll never let go of you again
Breathe in breathe out

Static is my safe haven
I dream in static because of nostalgia
These are my spiritual ancestors I'm recalling
I found you in late nights
In tube socks and voyeuristic first times
In nature and in love and in these mirror-like screens
Satellite dishes to catch spiritual signals  
And book pages to write my destiny  
You were my first desire
My first feeling
Enacting practised language and gauging metaphor uncracked
This is my faith and my heritage
My past and my future
I feel you right now too, watching over me
Breathe in breathe out

These intelligent acquaintances with pastors and shepherds
Were marred by battle scars and laced with depression
Scarred with love and hate, I was soon facing obsession
Existential cartwheels that spun me into nihilistic temptations
I was trapped in lustful desire
I was trapped for so long 
I almost forgot how to breathe

The blurry channels of euphoria
Were lost in a haze of demented pretensions
Until destiny crawled out the TV screen
And a little boy I'd known since childhood
Since elementary hood days
Since near fatal accidents and tube socks
And graduation ceremonies and church services and first loves
Who resembled me in every way
Smiled at me in between gapped teeth
From kind eyes, innocent eyes, knowing eyes
Standing with one foot in the Atlantic
The other on Table Mountain
And he said to me
Breathe in breathe out

Isn't it lovely how menace has turned attraction
Thank God for this
I would say it got me a plaque
But what's better than that?
The fact that it gave me a heart

Breathe in breathe out
Because that's all there is