Imaginary Parts of 'Z' / The Bellyscratch Whores

It’s so silent in the deserts of the mind
It’s so bloody cold out here.
The bleak white sun wounds the air
And bleeds rather than shines.

He’s so tired he can feel himself think;
And he’s been sitting here since God-knows-when,
It may have been a year, it may have been ten;
His hair is turning white; your eyes are turning pink
Unless I’m seeing things:
It’s easy to hallucinate
When all you have left are your eyes and your fate,
And one of them burns, and the other one stings.

Gathered here we are all bereaved
And cynical about it – some of the time.
We are starved for Literature and thirsty for Rhyme
But all we ever do about it is feel grieved
Or listen to midnight sighs, or both, or neither.
Thirsty as we are at the bottom of the well,
Vulnerable as we are beneath our shells,
Cold as we are at the bottom of the seether –
It’s all in our hearts, it’s all in our heads:
The world is full of love when the world is full of fear.
There are those who’ve never laughed and those who never shed a tear,
But they’re all the same to us, we’ve torn our brains to shreds.

We seek solace in the forgiveness of Time,
And therefore repeat, neverending, into its silken ear –
It’s so bloody cold out here,
It’s so silent in the deserts of the mind.

I find this a bit rambling and confused, but it is a worthy introduction to the Juvenilia, both in that sense, and in that it centers on some very common themes for me at the time. These themes were: blank page syndrome, and a generally bad opinion of so-called "literary" people. I never got round to choosing the most appropriate title, as each refers to a different theme in the poem. So I just left both.