Monsters in a wasteland. Loved and abandoned as an empty soul I drop the weights that keep me in place and I shut down. I shut down. Grab your mind back and spin it like a prism so you can see what it is that grabs you, what it is that eats you from the inside through the front side to the back side and the memories you lock them up, you lock them up. You shut them down. Fooled me with a sense of security. Always one step in a hold staring into my eyes to show me I will always lose so I will know who owns me. Always know who will break me; always who can hurt me; always let it go. Never like a victim; always just a reminder. Saying I can do to you what I want to do and you will never say – you will never say no. We are surrounded by monsters in a wasteland. Even the angels have forked tongues in this town. Oh that feeling, like a broken stray, learned the hard way, like a long driven night. Tired and rough, saddened and silent, speechless and morose. I always thought I knew the ones that would tear me down. I shut them down. I shut them out. I shut it off. I always thought I knew the ones I couldn’t trust. I shut them down. I shut it off. I shut them out. Where does this bother me? So many parts to the wasteland; so many areas inside. I walk from one space to the next across the divide. I see the twisted love and passion of the woodwork and the marred sense of deception by my own hands and the morbid half delusion of compassion raped with fire on a catwalk like a whore caressed in beautiful attire like an image in an art fare and everyone stops to see; everyone stops to gasp looking up and down across the canvas she sits there up on the broken limb of some old willow tree, hiding from the reflection on the pond, hiding from her reflection on the pond. She shut them down. She locked them out. She forgot herself.

She hung herself in her silence and swung by the rope of her own blank stare. In the wasteland she could see the fires up on the hills of every point, burning down to her, burning her down. What was it about the wasteland? I hop down and wander around confused. Confused she and I are one in this dream. I wish it was a dream. I wish I could shut it off. I wish I could shut them down. I wish. Fooled into thinking you are loved by the deadwood. The same deadwood they will make your box out of and bury you in. What is this pain? Its new, humble, empty, like an unopened barrel of wine it has its own unique expression and a bite that bites you back. Where are you? Under the deadwood? Perhaps it is because you have been made as flesh without compassion. Perhaps it is because you have been made as a runway for a landing. Perhaps it is because you are a nothing in the void, screaming in a vacuum, silent in a gunfire, struck dead by a sense of morbid detached awakening from the darkness of it all. From the darkness of the wasteland...for there are monsters here. You know, because you have seen them. And they have tasted you. Tasted your fears, run rampant through your flesh, and turned your head away while they backed you into a dark room to quietly cry. And they don’t even know – they don’t even know that they have won. They won over you. They beat you down and they beat you. And you know it and thank god that they don’t. But your face tells the story and they sense the weakness; the adrenaline pulses through them all over again. I used to shut them out; used to know who they were; the monsters of the wasteland. But now they know you too and I’ll be damned they wear your face. I never knew. God to leave this place; to be safe. It’s all I ever wanted; all I ever dreamed of. Under the deadwood; I dreamed of you. dreamed of you.