How sweet it feels — to dream
Of a life that will never be.
To melt into shallow visions,
Like sugar lost in boiling tea.
To drift through fictions, soft and kind,
And sleepwalk through a phantom age,
Escaping life, escaping time —
A coward locked inside a cage.

He lives a hundred borrowed lives,
A hundred fates, a hundred lies.
He feeds his narrow, timid mind
With scenes where no true sorrow lies.
They’re sweeter than the bitter truth,
More gentle than the world outside —
Where life is raw, and sharp, and cruel,
And none of us are free to hide.

So let him drown in pretty dreams,
In fogs of comfort, safe and still.
He trades the weight of honest pain
For hollow joys that never will
Become a life — just phantom plays
Projected in a vacant head,
While real tears are left uncried,
And real battles left for dead.