August (poem version)

Poem version/edit
August in a troubled mind, and leaves are falling.
Lightly, and with a swish, they swirl darkly towards the
ground to pile up against her vision. They are black and
rotten:
it makes her want to cry.
World shouldn’t be this way.
leaves brush against her like spiderwebs.
She hates spiders.
Bands of gold reach down into the water like elongated fingers,
stretching for the mystery below, but they can never touch it.
Clouds like another world, cleaner, blanker,
vastly more,
complex and beautiful.
The loneliest place I ever saw was just
beyond my reach. From behind an airplane window I watched this world go by.
Piled spires like castles of white-and-grey cotton
spun from the finest and softest of thread, so fine and soft
that it wasn’t even real.
the not-me sees it from a different point of view;
great caves and tunnels and mind-numbing drops into the green
land below.
green, so pretty, but wounded too,
Diseased. Something grey with lights that shone too bright,
and rude.
saw it, the eternal they:
crawled sickeningly, growing, spreading
glad she was not there, like the mud in a microscope,
no matter how strange and lovely. Here, in the cold palaces of the sky,
nothing touches her.
And the clouds are so beautiful they hurt.