There are many who have designs upon this world
And dream of wild and vast reformations
I have heard them talking in their sleep
Of elegant mutations
And cunning annihilations
I have heard them whispering in the corners of crooked houses
And in the alleys and narrow back streets of this crooked creaking universe
Which they, with their new designs, would make straight and sound
But each of these new and ill-conceived designs
Is deranged in its heart
For they see this world as if it were alone and original
And not as only one of countless others
Whose nightmares all proceed
Like a hideous garden grown from a single seed
I have heard these dreamers talking in their sleep
And I stand waiting for them
As at the top of a darkened flight of stairs
They know nothing of me
And none of the secrets of my special plan
While I know every crooked creaking step of theirs

I first learned the facts from a lunatic
In a dark and quiet room that smelled of stale time and space
There are no people
Nothing at all like that
The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion
Each of which winds itself upon the supreme insanity
That there are persons of any kind
When all there can be is mindless mirrors
Laughing and screaming as they parade about
In an endless dream
But when I asked the lunatic what it was that saw itself within these mirrors
As they marched endlessly in stale time and space
He only rocked and smiled
Then he laughed and screamed
And in his black and empty eyes
I saw for a moment, as in a mirror
A formless shade of divinity
In flight from its stale infinity
Of time and space and the worst of all
Of this world's dreams
My special plan for the laughter
And the screams