Persephone and The Madhouse

Shadows arrive, peeling light, kicking and screaming, from every corner:
Throwing daylight’s cobwebs to the mercy of the night,
To the ravages of madness who rip and destroy in delight.

She comes to life in this bullring:
Where the lost souls dance on flighty feet, just out of reach,
Cutting delirious scars in the patchwork skin of her mind.
Paper thin and reeling she flies,
Ducking and weaving over these broken streets
Where sorrows lie strewn as roses, an otherwordly ballroom.

She pulses, molten glee through secret fantasies
Dissolved in her naive ideals of romance and piracy on the high seas.
She never sees the envy in her silhouette,
Trailing her childish footsteps through reality’s dream.

For she is air, and she is breath, she is joy and despair
Cares not of death, invincible in this fearless night:
Playing spies in her darkling trees, climbing ruby webs of fragility,
Plundering turncoat parklands and slumbering streets.
Black fingers soothe her choking heart.

But she is no slyphide and she dances mournfully,
For she cannot sing miracles and sleep music, safe in sound,
She’s but a shadow
Smoke and mirrors
Sepia and grey. She runs from the unrelenting days,
Tinted green and hunted, she flees in vain,
Beset by the horrors which care not for light, nor air
Seeping through the faultlines in her spun spider silk hair
Through the bloodshoots in her eyes
And the corners of her mind.

She worshipped the moon
She thought this night would fight for her, be salvation
Lap up the tears wept by her wrists, kiss her wounds away
Or at least keep the wolves at bay.

But what penance paid by shadows can replace that gaping hole
From whence her tainted heart fled, dancing
On the path of those lost souls?