By home, by the sea.

I was once propped up against a wall,
watching the wind rough up the sea.
Quietly puffing at a cigarette,
contemplating gulls circling downward.

Old man approaches, wind battered drunk;
flatcap askew and squinted glare.
Red faced, a coastal living story:
days of work, whisky and violence.

Sandpaper hands rub together, he
removes his cap, crunches between
hands; when he speaks, voice of a thousand
cigarettes and yells from football stands.

Offers a greeting, "Hello son, fit
is it yer dein oot ere, on
a day like 'is?"  A harsh whisper soft
behind roaring skies, gunkit mettle.

I tell him; "Simply I'm passing time,
watching sky and sea in skermish,
patiently waiting for some
resolution to come between them."

He laughs: a hearty sound full of joy,
unexpected beside grimaced
facade.  He sees the shock I hide.
Try to hide.  He sits against grout and stone.

Together we watch outward for a
time, held in quiet reflection;
angry sea tumoulous, throws his weight
around, spoilt child temper tantrum.

Boats and birds scurry round him, attempt
to calm him, they look to me like
toys and rubber ducks splashed round
merrily Baby Jesus' bathtub.

A timeless moment between us both,
inside a still split second, shared
by between tick and tock, where unmade
thoughts fade and newborn choices replace.

Broken by a thing so soft as the
blink of an eye, frozen intro-
spection to fraught extrovertion,
and the strangers beside one another.

Cigarette passed, hands sheltered flame
and the clouds of our smoke sail up.
Slowly, then faster, caught up by the
rush of the howl, torn inwards and apart.

Two silhouettes in the fading glow,
the watching parent has changed;
Never another word spoken til the
last puff of smoke; simple nods exchanged.

And off he wanders down the path, with
warm glow of the booze and the salt
of the air inside him, and outside
I stand, gaze fixed firmly on the shore.

Last Moments

Stare out of that window and listen to stupid songs while I try and tell you why things might be alright.  Sat on my bed with the same shitty music in loop down low while the rain spatters off the window, the light casting thin shadows over the wooden floor.  The heat of the day has passed and the cool of night is drawing in, blue skies clouded over and now all there is is grey.

I sit tentatively behind you, wanting to put a hand on your shoulder but i feel you recoil from just the thought passing through my head, as if you can tell what i'm thinking.  But somehow you still don't hear the thoughts that rush through my head whenever you're around.  The quickest of flashes sets off a rush of different memories, like a kid who hangs on the bars of a roundabout that has been spun with all his might before jumping on,
his fingers gripped so hard, but the force is simply too much and he can feel himself slipping away.  Fear rises in his stomach and through his throat, as if he's going to be violently sick, but the thrill of it all is what doesn't stop him. 

But you don't sense any of that.

The pitter patter and the soft beat are all that keep us together.  The distance between us is more than just a few fingerlengths and I can feel you moving away with every second that ticks past.  Your head is turned away but I can still feel your eyes on me, although I know they gaze out the window and that you are actually far away from here.  Thoughts elsewhere, caught up in the non-present, in a different situation and a different mood, a different time, a different place and a different you.  I wonder if you're thinking about me, about us and what we could have been.  if it had been different for us and if we hadn't gotten to this place here, in this room, sitting alone with each other on my bed.  I hope that you do, but I feel like I'm in the presence of death.

The empty longing for something that has passed, the void inside and the colour has drained from everything around, the sound has muted and the world has detatched itself from you.  The things that you once saw are gone, the little things that made you smile and feel connected, ripped away and now things of misery and dark.  Happiness is so bleak now.

I place a hand near your side and already it feels wrong.  So awkward and confused and I feel a pain through my stomach, as if something is pulling me from the inside out.  My head is confused and I feel all the energy coming from out of me as I use it all to will you to see me, here beside you.  To see me as you once did, to just turn round and understand again.  For everything to be as one and for the colour, the sound and the warmth
come back to me.  Only you can do this and as I watch you, I feel it all slipping away.

I let out a quiet sigh.  Not from frustration, as words like that feel like I'm blaming you.  I'm not here to place blame, I'm here to tell you, to make you understand.  Why can't you understand?  Maybe if we just sat here for the rest of time then it wouldn't matter.  Time almost stands still right now, so maybe we could be stuck here forever anyway.  The world wouldn't notice if just the two of us slipped off together to be in our own little world.  Nothing to get caught up in, nothing to distract, only the two of us frozen in time.

I want to put my arm round you, to pull you close and to whisper in your ear.  To take hold of your body and pull it close to me, and to take these covers of mine and hide us from the world.  We can still have our own blue skies hidden under the sheets and we can pretend there are no grey skies now, or there will be ever again.  The sun can always shine for us, if only you let me show you.

I would make you a queen and I would worship at your navel, kiss you tenderly and delicately brush your skin with my tongue and with my fingertips.  Slowly breathe onto you all the soul that I have, yours to keep and treasure and to do with what you will completely.  I hold that picture in my mind, you like a statue that I can keep with me, and i fear now that it is all i will be left with.

The sun is disappearing and the room becomes dimmer.  It feels like the air has become stagnant and bitter, it no longer wants to be here either.  My arm aches but I dare not move it, to break the moment or the silence.  I know the second that I do that everything will be over, like a signal for the end and that will be all we ever have together.  That I'll never see your face again and the few minutes afterwards I will sit and watch the bed where
you sat slowly lose the shape of you and turn back into nothingness.  Just another piece of cloth which hangs onto even more meaninglessness.

But you don't even wait for it.  Something has happened, the air has been unsettled and it awakens you from your dream of elsewhere.  Or maybe you just decided that it was time to rejoin the rest of the world, your world, the world where things are different and I'm no longer part of.  I feel under the numbness inside me a tearing feeling that rips through my whole body, the pain is almost immense already.  I dare not think what it would
be like without this numb feeling.  You move to get up and almost like a jolt my arm reaches out to grab you.  You barely turn your head and mumble something that I can't quite catch before you move away and my arm drops beside where you just were.  I look down and watch your shape slowly start to disappear as you walk away, each step further like a molecule shifting.  I can't bare to lift my head and look.

My mouth is desperate to open and say a thousand things, my whole body stings and is unable, breath sticks in my throat and all I can do is tremble.  I watch the shape and the shadow from outside that is coming for it, to take it away and to join me in solitude.  To taunt me, to hurt me.  To be my only friend and companion, the only thing that is left for me in this world and to take the shreds that are left of me and envelop me whole until there is possibly nothing left to leave me with.

There is a thump of a door closing and I am truly alone.  My hand is stroking where you have been and I slowly count the touches that I have left before it disappears.  I close my eyes.  The music has stopped.  In the distance, I can hear the traffic and somewhere there is a bird singing.  These things would have brought me comfort, but now all they bring is sorrow.  The song is not one of happiness, it is a solitary cry into the evening sky.  I hear
stuttering breath and the sound of material being touched.  And then everything stops.

A quiet click, and then the music starts to play again.

Start Again

Another hot and sweltered white light night.

Ideas stifled like the air that clamours.

Thoughts and the world are silent together.

Dreams overtake and leave solitary confinement.

Eyes and ears hold out intently and wait.

Nothing passes or speaks and patience is only left to wain.

Tiredness doesn't always mean sleep, only leaving.

Remained restless exhaustion, cracked covered serendipity.

Nights used to be filled with unruled thoughts and dreams.

Now an only friend has gone, no understanding is left here.

In a shrinking space, every soul has gone.

Drowning in dreams and the journey towards tomorrow.

Trapped in today as it fades, stuck between the two and exhasparated.

Random images pass and fleet, memories of yesterday.

Childhood and climbing trees, tightly wound roundabouts and playgrounds of the free.

Secret clubhouses and the top of the world, forests of secrets for intrepid souls.

Lazy days under marshmallowed skies, then and now.

Ultimately the prettiest things converge into indecipherable mess.

Never yet learned to untangle, to grab the fly on the fence, nor to understand.

The walking asleep and the unaccepted shrunk downs.

Future dreams that remain in the past.

Every moment unrealised waiting for discovery and elusive enlightenment.

Down in the basement, the gutter and the mud.

Heads are tilted upwards to castles in the sky.

March 2010 - Bound

For JM.

The heat that approaches is frightening to me.

The auburns and the screaming tangerine swim upwards, snapping wildly, casting darkened lines across my face.  I imagine all but the gleam of my eye is visible, a solitary twinkle among the massing cover of light lacking.  It crawls like a lover into the form and curves of a body lying in wait, linking pieces forming like they should never have been apart.

An unruly imagination could liken the outlines and shapes to the monsters that creep around, waiting for the eyes of children to slowly fall shut, dreams of giant robots and castles in the sky roaming over rolling eyes.  I remember when I used to dream.

Of objects and moulds I watched through square voids that surround me, revealing gold streaked views of ever sprawling worlds, and at other times, silvered oceans that unfurled continuously.  A spy hole that swirled, never stationary, fidgeting without consistent form or thought, a shapeless mirage.

Without my coup, I could be free of these things, and be what I dream of.  To touch, to roam, to play, to love and to hate, to scream, to laugh and to cry and to die a little inside.  A pure wind unstoppable.

But now like tribes angered with vengeful hunger, I am trapped here with the peril that pushes forward, reaching out to me like the tongue of a lizard.  The ones that I have seen on the little box of light sitting darkly in the corner, that suddenly will burst into life, showing massive beasts that flow surprisingly graceful through worlds of blue and gray explosions through which arms throw themselves into the air, chaos surrounding.  And a thousand other things that flash - a crashing slideshow pausing for a moment to then be replaced by something newer, something brighter, and something better hungry and willing to take the centre stage.

The box lies dormant now, almost siding with the figures that wreak havoc in the black.  Allies to the fold.  I wish my legs would take it upon themselves to just run like the rest of me tell them to.  The heat draws itself closer and I feel like I’m beginning to melt, each part of me transforming steadily into sludge as I sink downwards into myself.  I’m paralyzed and isolated; all I can do is watch and melt away.  Why did I have to be here?  Stuck, and unable to save myself. 

If only my little legs could carry me far, far away from me here like Dorothy.  I wish that I could see the fields, the sea and the sky.  I try to close my eyes but my gaze is fixed.  I think inside myself, picturing it all and trying to block out around me.  The monsters are laughing at me now, I can almost hear them above the quiet roar that is building, spurred on by random explosions that spark suddenly and disappear even quicker like an afterthought of regret.  It was never a good idea to do this, they could think.  And then they could all change their mind, the tribe turning backwards and leave me be.

Blazes of kaleidoscopic colour run around my head, light and shadow is ambushing me and I don’t know what to do.  If I could cry, I think I would.  But all I can do is be still, the outside hiding what really is happening.  A torrent of pictures in my head, my own personal box of light strobing faster, edging closer like the mass around me, towering up and about to engulf.  And I can’t even scream aloud, every fibre of my being desperate for it.  Time feels like it’s at a brink, about to stand still.  So close, now it’s all over.

It.  Just.  Stops.

And go.

Like the click of a stopwatch, everything flows over me – the bright gold irking at the shadows, it has come fighting from my very soul.  They stumble back and I feel a rise of emotions so hard and unrepentant I can’t begin to start contemplating.  Black swirls and dim flutters of golden glitter dance then crash and fall, the roar replaced by a silent stillness like all that I show and the melody pleases my ears.  In the distance I hear crowing back and forth, a call in song and I watch as a sheet ripples off runways of green, brand new.

Inside I sigh.  I see it all through the holes in front of me and now more than ever I want to run, to skip, to jump, to dance over it all.  Why can’t I move?

I stare with a longing and will myself, waiting for the moment that I spring into life, racing forwards into a sea of light, of merging and separating again colours, to edges of worlds so I can see over the precipice, the next one revealing itself as the page of the scrapbook is turned.  I glimmer like the lights that fly above me, overseeing the changing of the tides, hiding from one before revealing themselves again in another.  I wait patiently, successfully managing to contain the excitement that whirls inside me like a roundabout that is out of control, gripping so tight, at any second about to fly off into another world that is new and untold.

And I count - one...  two... three.

Then I run.

Prose #2 - Untitled - 02/09

Building up boxes is all I feel like I ever do.  Heavy lines form on the page, a vacant stare rests on my face.  Controlling the pen, held in a light grasp, I slowly stack each one upon another. 

The world around me is like a blur.  Everything is sped up while the steady movement of the pen is slow and graceful, like a park in the middle of a city.  Sometimes I imagine myself like a park.  Still and green while the dark and the grey surrounds, slowly trying to eat away at it.  I draw deep breaths, each feels stale and burns the inside of my lungs.  Each draw feels like another part of me is lost, compromised to a world I want no part in.  A land that is being invaded by a foreign country.  I don’t want your invasion. 

Suddenly, breath sticks in my throat, my body freezes.  A split second passes, everything stops.  And it stays like that, stretching on until my body snaps back sharply into reality.  It reaches out and grabs me, pulling me into its dirty stentch and crazed bustle and sweeps me away.  I blink and look around.  The noise rushes into my ears and causes me pain.  My head strains.  The inncessent chatter, raping me with each nattering decibel.  Nausea climbs in my throat and I find myself walking.  Everything still feels clouded to me, I can’t think fully.  I know that I want to get out of here.  I work on that premise.

I walk the streets but try to avoid taking in the sights.  I feel the grime covering my skin, penetrating my pores.  The smoke stings my eyes and I feel them redden.  I see different shapes as they pass.  The drunk who lies in a doorway, a stream of piss trailing from underneath him.  In the alleyway down from him, a whore calls out to her next customer.  I stop for a second as I pass her.  Maybe I can pay to forget, to not feel the disgust and the revulsion.  To stop the knot that has been building in my stomach to the point I think my waist might explode in front of me.  I imagine what it would be like to have my guts explode onto someone.  Blood and stomach lining slide down the faces of passers by.  It isn’t so hard to picture, they look vile to me anyway.  She notices I’ve stopped and calls out to me.  I carry on walking.

“Fuck you,” I hear her shriek from behind me.

Dogs bark in the distance and sirens wail.  The signs of downturn surround me.  Trash lines the streets, houses are falling into disrepair.  The smell of desperation reeks, it fills my nostrils with sharp acidity.

Wooded areas are only spaces filled with trees, hidden behind its bushled exterior only lies emptiness and void.  To hide or to escape, to lose one’s self or to only just pretend that the reality of what is happening is only a distant image.  The wind dances through like a bad cliché.  She runs through the gaps in the trees, letting her body move around like the lightest feather.  She never stops, nor does she ever tire.  Endless amounts of gleeful joy bundled up in sweetness and innocence.  The saccharine stereotype that taunts me with its sheer savagery.  Bile crawls its way up my throat and I feel an overwhelming sense of rage.  Fists clenched by my side, the knot inside me tightens even more.  My sense of escape has been completely destroyed and now all that I am left with, again, is everything that I run from.

Like rivers that run forever, all I can feel is eternal and never changing.  The things in my life only seem like the opposite of what everyone else thinks and feels.  Like the world is some anti karma that I have been left with.  To suffer on my own, with the world surrounding me like a menacing shadow that silently floats round the bed of a sleeping child.  The monsters that hide under beds and lurk in closets are real to me, they are my constant companions as I stumble round the world, always looking in at what I’m not a part of.

Her overly large breasts stare me in the face as she bends over to pour.  The top she’s wearing attempts to contain them but only looks at the brink of tearing.  I wonder if the slightest surprise might cause the fabric to give way and for her breasts to spill out.  Waitresses in cafes like this always look like mothers from TV shows – busty blondes with an overwhelmingly maternal instinct to care.  I can see her beady eyes watching me, waiting for me to let out some overwhelmed sigh and reveal all my problems to her.  She waits a while before she asks, “everything OK, honey?”  She says the end of honey with an accent, making it sound like honee.  It only adds to the emphasis of falseness in the question.  I can never decide if the will to care is only a mask for a greed of information or to distract a person from their own self-loathing.  Not being part of a world of lies only means that I have a distinct personal truth.  The downside to this is that there is nobody to share it with.  A glittering hope of subverted happiness is taken away.  I merely smile back before staring into the blackness of my coffee.

Watching the whiteness of dress turn into a bloodied red I could only feel the exact opposite of what I should feel.  It didn’t stop me.  I watched as the expression of realisation on her face turned to horror and then into fear and I felt a stillness.  Like a mere observer, watching a silent movie.  Her screams and whimpers were only drowned out noises as hissing silence rattled through my ears.

I’ve always wondered why pills are split into white and red.  I watch them shake in my hand with curiosity.  They make an absent rattling sound as they roll around, surfing up the curve of my fingers before returning to the bowl of my palm and circling the brim.  I watch continuously, watching more fall on to my hand as I sprinkle them down from my other.  They fall almost in slow motion, for a moment holding their space in the air before falling like rain.  I almost find it beautiful.

By the third cup of coffee, I can see her chest heaving with exaparation.  Every five minutes she would come past, watching me like prey.  Pretending to be cruising for another cup to fill, but I knew what she was up to.  Now, she stands at the corner of the bar, her fingers tapping impatiently.  I wonder if I turn my glance to the cake display for a second, hers might follow and it may distract her.  She wasn’t massively overweight but women with issues always have indulgence problems.  It makes them easier to manipulate.  And every women has issues.  I watch her breasts rise and fall for a while.  I ponder the similarity between breasts and an ass and men’s fascination with them.  The desire, the complete absorbtion by them.  There’s a reason that so many men like tit wanks, it’s as close as they feel comfortable with before putting their cock in an ass.  Then there’s the men who actually do.  Often the first to declare to the world how straight they are, how they aren’t some faggot, always ready to beat on those who are.  I wonder how many times my new mother has been fucked up the ass and how much she really loathes it, being made to feel like the man that he really wants her to be, the whole time pretending that she really gets off on it. 

Sitting alone in the dimly lit room, I slowly trace my fingers along the floorboards.  I swirl around the grain, making shapes out of the patterns in the wood.  Sometimes a blister would catch me, the sudden sharp feeling penetrating through me.  It was odd to find a reaction.  For so long now, all I was used to was a vague sense of loss.  Like something should be there but wasn’t, but I never knew what it was.  I watch the blood spilling out of the cut, the wood becoming a moistened red.  Drips falling like the red side of the pills.  Waiting for a moment, I feel the seconds draw out before I pull out the wood and the flowing of blood increases.  The falling rain is heavier.  I don’t hear as they come up behind me.  It’s not until I feel the first impact on my head that I realise anything is going on.  It takes a second or two before I know where I am.  I fall to the floor and remain there, dazed.  I turn over and wait for the blur in my vision to stop.  I can only see a figure hover above me, they are still unclear to me.  I feel a foot connect with my stomach and curl up in a ball instinctively, the breath knocked out of me so that I can’t scream out in agony.

I gently rock from side to side, willing the pain to go away but before it can I notice that I don’t feel as much.  Everything seems at a distance and all I’m doing is watching.  I can hear movement and rummaging before I feel the air in front of my face sharpen as something hits off my skull, then the little I could see fades away into black.  No matter what happens I always end up in the dark.

He was only young when he first started to get ill.  Not very young, but still old enough to merit remark.  The odd cough and sniffle here and there but it soon worsened.  The cold would heighten it and he would become weaker.  Doctors couldn’t find what was wrong and only subscribed palsy advice, to take more vitimans and make sure that he got a good amount of fresh air.  It soon started to get to him though, the sparkle began to fall from his eyes and his whole demeanour changed.  He was what people would describe as “bright and cheery”, always a smile on his face.  Much like the girl.  Always the little angel, but only a matter of time would change it.  Time always corrupts and one by one, it corrupts us all.  Seconds pass to minutes that pass to hours and passing time always brings darkness.  Inevitability is a word I despise.

She was much better at hiding it.  It was only the boy that anyone noticed, the sick one who everyone fussed and muddled over.  It drove her to despair, driving her deeper.  Resentment filled her with rage and her mind only became more disturbed, pushing an already warped mind.  She began to hate him with every ounce of her being but he was the one person that she couldn’t take it out on.  And with everyone’s attentions focused on him, it made it easier to find the next best thing so close by.  It wasn’t until I lay on that floor, unconscious with blood spilling from me that anyone noticed a thing.  Crouched in the darkness, with a plank in her hand and a face like stone.  They say I almost died.  It was then that they noticed a pattern, and it was then that they realised it was only a matter of time before I was like them.

My life is a ticking clock.  The moment I was born the clock began counting down, already born into something I wasn’t part of.  It’s taken longer for me but I exist with more than a distaste for what I’ve ended up with, to what I’ve become and will be.  Built up to the point where it feels like I feel nothing at all, but at any moment it will penetrate right through me, searing me from flesh to bone like fire.

As I watch her, I can feel my fists clench by my side.  I look down into my coffee as my hand slides down beside me, my fingers grasp the shining metal.  Blood trickles from my hand onto the seat and down my face.  I stare at the dim reflection on the surface of the cup and realise that it isn’t blood.  I feel a dull sensation increasing in my hand, increasing in intensity shooting adrenaline round my body, jolting me upright.  I look at mother in the eye as I slowly walk towards her.

“You want more coffee?”

Prose #1 - A condition of human - 02/09

I once was kept in a room like this.

Barren walls with cracks of desolance, blanketed in places with dewy moss that creeps through the shadows.  Milky light filters through a spored atmosphere and distils it before what is left is evaporated by thirsty walls.  The deafening sound of silence is accompanied by the varying drip and drop that cannot be located.  Following the sound leads to nothing and then off in another direction, the patter can be heard once again.  Often, you can begin to think you are in a square room going round in circles. 

Things can penetrate your mind like that after not long.  Did I even move at all, or do the shadows hide something from me – like the room is not square at all?  And so the tip tap of the drip drop patters and you find yourself absorbed by it as you stare into the darkness and wonder if you can begin to see anything.  Or has it already all been seen so many times before?  Time starts to slip away from you as if each drop is another part of anything you think you know disappearing, being absorbed into the darkness by the something that you thought you might have seen, seemingly more apparent and more powerful with each drop.

Is that what is happening?  Is that creature that I think I can see but I cannot, taking myself away from me?  Is each drop just another part that it has absorbed while I try harder and harder to see?  Maybe if I stop spending time looking then it won’t be able to take anything.  But then as inevitable as the next second that draws out longer than the one before it, the drip drop seeps inside, turning you round and drawing you in once more.

Now there is a chair, in the centre of the room I think.  Has it always been there?  Or had I just been unaware?  Maybe the shadows had concealed it from me before so now I was only to notice.  But if the shadows had been hiding it, then that must mean the light is finally managing to creep through.  The creepee becomes the creeper.  Ha ha!  Maybe if I sit and think about this then it will become more clear to me.  If I see things in the light and from a different perspective then I can figure this all out.

So I sit.

My foot is tapping.  How long have I been here and what is my foot tapping for?  I look around but I cannot see anything but darkness eating shadow.  Darkness eating shadow – how can shadow eat darkness?  Surely a shadow is darkness and darkness shadow?  I do not understand how this can be.  Unless what I think is a shadow is in fact not a shadow.  So I look closer, peering in and leaning further off my chair until the hind legs begin to tilt up.  What can I see?  I do not know for I do not know what it is that I look for.  Maybe the only thing that I know is that I don’t know what I’m looking for.  I slip back into my chair to ponder this.  Maybe it’s time for reassessment.

I stand on the chair and raise my left leg.  Surely I could never have done this before... is that a question or a statement?  Now it’s a question, so was it a question to begin with?  Can you follow a question with another question?   Apparantly, so. 

The dripping has stopped.

I pause, holding my breath for fear that the slightest movement could trigger it off.  I wait for a while longer and nothing happens so I wonder what to do.  If I move, this could be dangerous.  But, if I stay still, then I will be stuck forever standing on a chair with one leg in the air.  And this just cannot do.  A resolute sigh escapes me and I slowly lower my leg so that the tip of my foot touches the chair.  The stillness of the room is so powerful that at any second I anticipate it could knock me to the floor.  So I must stop it.

The dripping starts.  I am in the dark.  Where is the chair?  Did the stillness push me before I had a chance to stop it?  I look down but I cannot see.  I feel my foot tapping and my eyes blinking with ever y drop.  What happened to the chair?  I cannot see any chair.  I must be being silly.  If there was a chair, I would be able to see it and I cannot see any chair, therefore there must not be a chair.  How foolish I can be!

So what am I doing here?

I must be here for a reason, or else I wouldn’t be here at all.  That decided, I must figure out where it is that I am.  This must be a room of some sort.  There is light that trickles in like dirty water, polluted by the dark that engulfs everything in here.  If I move towards it then I will be able to see better.  But then, if I move into the light, what if there is something else in here and then it will be able to see me?  That can’t be good.  Or could it?  Maybe if I creep towards it and stay out of sight then I can see, without being seen.  That might work.

I hear dripping and I can see cracks in walls.  There are walls and there are cracks.  I must be in a room, at least.  Success at last!  Saturated moss floods everything I can see, ever absorbing.  The light that creeps in, the water that drips... somewhere.  Where is that dripping coming from?  Wait a minute... I know this!

I was kept in a room like this once.