The walls were caving in, and he couldn’t breathe,
The fog was too thick, and the monsters out free,
He couldn’t go back, not when people don’t believe
The things he’s been through, and the things he’s seen.

He was shackled by the weight of what he couldn’t understand,
His bones straining at the sorrow he held upon his hands,
And so he wrote the naked truth on the expanse of his flesh,
The ink he used, his own bloodshed.

But the myth of Atlas was never engraved in scars,
Nor were Van Gogh’s masterpieces a product of falling apart.
Still, their struggles became the trophies of society,
As if antlers of a prized animal displayed in full glory.