Steven J. Messina - Bedtime Story

Poet Billy Lamont’s Medicine Show @ Bowery Electric, NYC 7/28/24
Bedtime Story
The voices act as warring tribes, in fortresses cerebral
Hurling memories like stones, with astral catapults
Treachery and chaos reign, in fields of long dead slumber
Dreams indoctrinate their subjects, into nightmare cults
And demons don’t negotiate, anxiety forbids it
While financing depression’s research, far from prying eyes
Restlessness, relentlessness and tension, dig their trenches
Separating savage lands, while plundering supplies
Tools that might’ve turned the tides, tumult and trepidation
Melted down instead, poured into huge sarcophagi
Madly molding monsters, mean, maniacal and morbid
Unrequited rages, spitting curses at the sky
Cruelty goads insomnia, the voices raise like razors
Accompanied by faces, dead and living join the fray
Missteps decades old retraced, mind stumbling toward exhaustion
Wounds reveal themselves with pride, as armor falls away
Cold sweat lakes are rife with poltergeists
Stretching hours into eternities
Claustrophobic cells house hungry hopes
As skeletons extend their limbs, like keys
Somewhere in the abyss, the broken dawn
Eleventh hour sunlight halts the hate
The warring tribes retreat into the void
The mind regains a somewhat conscious state
Steven J. Messina 2024