I know you will be alive and in love
like a child for the first time.
You will chase and daydream
and trace their name on fogged over windows
and even though you're older,
you'll be none the wiser
and just as dazed and clueless
as I am now.

Tick. Tock. Two hundred down.
Pulp.
Swindled minds flock
so easily into their cages,
sealed vents pushing gas into their lungs.
Carpenter's masterpiece.
Hooks hanging from walls,
bloodied chains supporting old bones.
Rot.
Mirror image rooms kept secret, filled
with decay and trapped ghosts. The neon
sign flickering. 'Hotel'.
Pulling the moths in with its fire,
ready to burn them.  

Tick. Tock. Twenty seven around.
Confession.
The drugs were inefficient -
they never slept forever.
I had to help them get there. I was born
with the devil in me
and he sings like a poet in the shadow of evil.
Gruesome.
I feel their blood on my hands and I enjoy it.

Tick. Tock. Nine were found.
Possession.
"Satan corrupted me, controlled me."
"Innocent."
"I am imprisoned within myself, I swear."
"He made me."
The lever is flipped, I fall.
My neck does not snap.
Instead, I struggle, the air being forced
from my body. Darkness comes
after the fond memory of a knife in my hand
and blood on the walls of my ****** castle.

You hide behind a curtain of insecurity,
blushing and allowing your eyes to fall
to the floor when they give you kind words
to follow and acknowledge. Deflection
is a skill so fine tuned and honed
that it's innate, a reflex built
into your body. Yet you never stopped
to think that they never had to say
those lovely things
and they chose to anyway because they truly
believed them. Perhaps it's time
for you to believe them too.

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"

I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.