Though I have yet to leave these fields of green,
And daily rain has broke for bluest sky,
I beg Mnemosyne for the vaccine
To purge all that remains, to help untie
The images still lingering enclosed,
For though these skies remain in cloudless form,
Malignant misery awaits composed
To flood the guarded gates by darkest storm,
A tempest called forth seeded by the most
Perennial of memories that yield
Not to the wishes of their tired host,
And so I beg to drink and to be healed,
Still I do breathe but ask that she relent
And baptize me to end this long lament
In one version it was just an old house
a Victorian or Queen Anne
decayed though, with weathered siding
and dark broken windows
In another version it was an institution
a grey monolithic maze filled with dead ends
and the diminishing shadows of
caretakers I could never catch up to
sliding down concrete walls
Wardens or killers whose footsteps
cracked on pine smelling linoleum
shapes of people outlined by echoes
And now I'm outside running from it
then running to it
A man on the roof looking away
Something on the roof
Nothing, no, nothing
Then I'm inside again twisting down
rickety spiral stairs to basements under basements
and always a fireplace
a cracked fireplace to walk past in fear
There are people in this house
There are muffled voices in this ward
forever in the next room, in another room
That's how I remember you:
As pure white light
Behind smiling eyes,
Eyes that loved me,
Crystalline light shining
Pure from virgin joy
I remember you like
Every shade of grey,
All shadows of indecision
And stricken doubt,
From ashen white
To murky coal
And I remember your
Darkest places,
Black like obsidian,
Outlined by glints of hope
Punching through leagues of grey
Back to whitest day 
