This is too far,
I know I’ve gone too far.
As if the light of day were enough to wake
my dormant wit,
               But I know it’s not.
My children lay dead. My wife lies cold and still.
How long I sit in silence
   I can’t know.
My arms are lifeless weights along my sides,
My hands are crusted
With my family’s blood.
I cannot know the horrors of last night,
Echoes of screams
                   And a rage not my own
Are all that I can manage to produce.
At last I gather
their once warm bodies
and lay them down beneath the high noon sun.
Our house is now a broken shell,
    Much like me.
The door hangs from a single copper hinge
A parody of
   my fragile mind.
No windows remain, only empty holes
Beneath a partially
       collapsed thatch roof.
I fall to my knees and begin to dig,
Every handful of dirt
Is agony
To my shattered hands, I welcome the pain.
I dig the hole
wide and deep to fit them.
At last, my greatest fear has come.
The grief arrives,
            and bears down upon my chest.
I lower my children first into the ground.
And kiss their brows,
       holding each, one last time.
My tears raining down on their broken bodies.
I gather my wife
    And softly place her
Alongside our children.
I kiss her lips
And whisper all my thoughts
Into her beautiful deaf ears.  I moan
And heave, tasting
       salt and earth and blood.
“Bring me death if you have any mercy!”
I shout to the clouds
                 and blue above.
I wait for death but there is no reply.
Gods do not answer
                                 pleas of the insane
I ask for their forgiveness one last time
And heap the earth
       Onto my happiness.
I walk away towards nowhere, anywhere
But this place where
My murdered family lies.