Caeruleum by Mike Dickson

Staring into the mirror blankly. Thirty minutes. Maybe more. Maybe forty. The face that looks back starts to become oddly unfamiliar to me.

If you hold that gaze for long enough it becomes something else. Someone else. That face that felt familiar now becomes a stranger, someone you know who has been occluded by the years since making your first acquaintance. Like a repeated sound it starts to become less than a noise. It is something dark and alien. Something preanimal that haunts you.

The reddened eyes. The thinner hair. The skin now marked and grazed, tainted by the imperfections you have collected across the decades. That disappearing jawline, and the tiny tears on the lips.

Somewhere deep inside that face is the face that I know better. I can see it barely outlined inside, struggling almost to escape from the prison within which time has bound it. We used to be more beautiful than this. Where did you go?

We have to allow for its escape. We have to set it free.

I take the razor blade in my grip and start to make the first carved incisions to set myself free from the darkness. I ignore the wet sting, driven on by the knowledge that what I am doing is for my own good: freedom.

My face comes apart, collapsing in wet strips that slap into the china basin as I hew off myself what I no longer want or need.

We all feel the need to know our former, real selves. It's really just a matter of having the will to do it.

Tracklist

1.	Caeruleum 01	4:00

2.	Caeruleum 02	4:08

3.	Caeruleum 03	5:17

4.	Caeruleum 04	7:25

5.	Caeruleum 05	6:55

6.	Caeruleum 06	2:30

7.	Caeruleum 07	6:26

8.	Caeruleum 08	4:02

9.	Caeruleum 09	3:08

10.	Caeruleum 10	7:21

Credits

released November 19, 2025

License