What is this place?
This no-place city
that dominates my dreams?
Non-descript streets.
hotel rooms and golf courses
serve as sets for my kitchen-sink nightmare.
Bungalows and burnt-out kiosks,
empty buses and endless roads.
Dream of NONplaces.
Jungles and classrooms.
Dirty relationships, police chases, sky-scrapers
-ditched drugs and wide-eyed lies.
Hypnotise me to the edge
where the non-city proper awaits.
A leap of no-faith.
Carnival in the sky.
The melted moon-face screams:
The bloodied sheets of my mind
were once white and pretty.
Where is this place?
The mind’s non-city?
"I have very vivid dreams. I used to think of them as a curse, but now I see them as a way of digesting extreme thoughts and emotions. In this poem I recall motifs and recurring images of these disturbing dreams and question what twisted, but beautiful part of my mind can create such fear and pain and also cinematic, poignant creativity. Because, I do not feel that the pain and problems I've had with mental health are necessarily an 'illness' or something separate to me; I can only speak for myself, but I feel that there is a strange place in my mind which leads to wonder and also suffering. The mind's 'non-city'. This was also inspired by Stephen King's 'Lisey's Story, which to this day is the scariest but most revealing book I ever read."