Too Far Out (Poetry)

Each night, asleep, I live a different life.
Not out of choice — it is a given rôle
already written, every move and line,
and so I play it like it was my own.

Some dreams are sordid, often haunted, dark
with symbolism, fragments of old fears.
I lie with men — all strangers — and I weep
for all the nameless demons I have known.

The fantasy’s untitled in my head,
the audience anonymous and blind,
I whisper someone else’s words and keep
flicking through the archives of my brain.

There’s bits of me kept safe in separate files —
divided in a dozen ways and shapes —
none of them familiar as a friend,
all of them imperfect and unkind.

I’ve lost myself, I cannot find my face
beneath the shadows of these other lives;
my thoughts have borrowed voices older than
the one I thought I recognised as mine.

Every night, I act another part
then wake in limbo, searching for what’s real,
clutching straws, like any drowning soul
who panics when they’re out of sight of land.