When the Mind Goes Astray

When the Mind Goes Astray

When restless thoughts begin to stray,

The strangest shapes come out to play.

They dance behind your closing eyes,

And greet you with a new surprise.

They take the bad, they take the good,

And mix them up as dreamers should.

They stir the colours, dark and bright,

And turn them into dreams at night.

Each colour holds a secret place,

A hidden world, a nameless face.

Where purple skies and rivers gleam,

And nothing’s quite the way it seems.

The red can burn with fierce desire,

The gold can set the stars on fire.

The blue can hold a silent tear,

The green can make our hopes appear.

Some shapes are soft, some shapes are wild,

Some bring the laughter of a child.

Some twist and turn, then disappear,

And leave a whisper in your ear.

A thought becomes a mountain high,

Old memories go drifting by.

And dreams that never learned to fly,

Find wings beneath a painted sky.

The past comes knocking at the door,

And scatters footprints on the floor.

The future waits beyond the blue,

With strange adventures coming through.

They have no rules, they have no plan,

They run as fast as colours can.

They bend the moon, they shake the sun,

Then laugh about the things they’ve done.

And somewhere in that mad parade,

Are all the dreams we never made.

The broken bits, the hopes we hide,

Still wearing all their hues inside.

So let them tumble, let them race,

Let every colour find its place.

For even chaos has a heart,

And madness sometimes turns to art.

And if you want to see my mind,

Just look at what I’ve left behind.

A splash of this, a streak of that,

A purple blob, a yellow splat.

I swear I meant to paint the sun,

But then my thoughts began to run.

And now my brain’s gone on a spree,

And left this crazy art to me!