In the attic
Swallowed ether
lust on the highest shelf

Down the well
Engorged consolation
salt discharged for the self

In the mirror
Mute refutation
the evasion-led sublime

Up the tower
Disseminated bile
the beguilement of the grime

Your love did not have its freedom
Was constrained in your chest
treated as a soldier,
released only to battle
And so your love made
the love you received  
a casualty of war

your love did not have truth
And was strangled in your throat
Made extortioner
Withheld to barter for power
And so your love made
the love you received
the currency for corrupt affections

I thought I had walked through a portal
But a portal had walked through me.
Not currency for corrupt affections
Nor weaponry on loves battle field
Silence found its voice in my throat
Love found itself in my chest

A white sheet hung on the wall,
to reflect back scenes,
from a projection of your choosing.

A canvas
for the drama, war, or comedy
of your inner world.

My form, my purpose
is inconsequential
in your bleeding need.

A public screen
A fantasy machine

And when your fiction is over,
I am as I've always been.

He gave us free will
and made obedience the key to his kingdom.
Offered unconditional love
with a caveat of repentance
Trust in his plan
is why your prayers go unanswered
Asked that you bear the guilt
for a martyred son he had forsaken
Using our free will
to chase the love of an abandoner
Naming faith an act of love
  in the absence of reciprocity
His act of love, to give us life
robbing worship from our mothers.

When you shave life & art down to reductive platitudes you confess an incapacity for complexity.
You confess an ineptitude for depth, nuance, & the metaphorical.
You confess a need to drag that which you do not understand into the emotional and intellectual shallows.

When you bastardise statements of love, strength, and hope into something shameful and weak, you confess your world view with repressed shame at its core.

Weaponise displays of unity & beauty into an ugly war zone of oneupmanship and confess your ache for hierarchy to hold beneath you, those whose experience you cannot fathom, whose strength you fear, and whose mind you cannot comprehend.

The desire to turn love into hate, peace into war, unity into division, strength into weakness, is your confession.

It’s a cowards world
Punching out a bravado beat on our apish chests
And a child’s vulnerability inspires only pity
A projectile repulsion of the weaknesses we hide
We’re all at war with ourselves.
Cutting the throats of whole stories, dragging their corpses to the grave and burying our personal hatred there.
Our lives become cemeteries of all the faces carved from us
We ***** elaborate digital monuments to decorate the rotting beneath.
And plant fragrant flowers of borrowed clichés to cover the stench.
And one day we whither, our cells begin their decay
We will meet our exiles in the graveyard of our collective cowardice