I love people like they’re gods.

With an offering at my side,
What do you want me to do while I am begging,
And you give me silent air?

When I want breathes, I stay home
And hold my sins in my lungs,
And count the seconds I am alive with dragged nails on skin.
This is why I can’t keep them long enough to draw blood.

I go to church for screams.
I go to let my heart beat in the hands of the Father.
Run me ragged, I want to have a use again.
Take my spirit, my soul and have me wonder if it’s one and the same.

To have him hold my body down and rip the sin out
If some should stay, I’d rather you leave me nothing.

Why am I a bug trapped to this Holy Bible?
Dust particles floating like flies,
Maybe this time you’ll make a sound.

And call for me.

Open the gates and I could be starving
And I could be gone to the world
And I’ll still tell you I miss you and I love you forever

Because people have left so much, the only word I know is stay
And they have so much left to say, the only word they know is sorry.

So much pain
Outrun the brain
Situated under chandeliers
In the old, ailing cavern
Reverberating ghouls
Lick the well of my ear
And now I am frightened
By the notion of the sun

Twisted asunder
Incisive thoughts
Corrupted domain
I live under a sky blue dome
A construct of my headmasters
Where I roam
Restless in the gloam

The brain has weighed me down
To my knees
I cannot find my knees
Or my eyes
My crooked fleece cannot protect me
From the chartreuse breath of the past

Life does me no favours
Therefore
I will give it everything
Until I am hollow and adjusted
Senile and peculiar
Must the brain remain?
Must the brain remain?

My words are a disservice
To the motions of the planets
They cannot grace this life
How little it all may matter

i was a child my father told me that every cigarette you smoked took five minutes off your life. i still remember my first — a lit belmont shoved between my parted lips mid-protest with a snide remark about how strange it was that i was thirteen and had never smoked — “five minutes,” i thought. i could sacrifice five minutes. within a year, five turned to ten and ten turned to thousands and, with every inhale, i thought, “five more minutes.” no longer a sacrifice, but a comfort; an inevitability. four years later, waking up in an unfamiliar bed in an east side motel, my throat raw, my body slick with cold sweat, tongue still bitter from cognac i couldn’t remember drinking, i’d lie awake and wonder how many more minutes had been taken from me, and whether i’d given them willingly. the following years pass in a haze, bestowing more leaden weights upon the shame that leaves me broken on the bathroom floor, knees bruised and bloodied. my lungs are black and my chest feels empty and i wonder if any of it ever mattered, and what, or who, it was that took the most from me. deep down, i know i gave it all willingly.

The moon changes it's shape to please your eye.

I know you won't believe it.

Even if the moon is eclipsed or out of sight, it will change it's shape to suit you right.

Stand under it, right now.

Even if you can't see her she's there.

And when she appears looking broken and uncompleted, in your eyes it will change to a perfect sphere.

Just for you.

So pay attention to that, and appreciate her for all that she is.

Because for you she would change her entire shape, just to please you.

The moon always hangs in the sky.

You trying to help me is like
Holding me up like a plant to a house lamp
Trying to help
Trying to heal
But naive to the point of stupidity
Dragging to the point of falling
Down
Down
Down
into
Dark
Because that light isn't a savior
It's the one at the end of the tunnel

Stoic amid the tranquil tides, the temperate zephyrs
But a fluttering spark, travelling through the aeons
Witness to the wonders of time, yet ever fleeting
The bearer of that which outlasts this eternal folly

However, for a certainty, even this steadfast paragon
Does not foresee what the clock hands have in store
And the fallen mouth their soft, intelligible rhymes
Thus the air carries this ephemeral elegy of euphony

But as the voices dance within those hallowed halls
Sound brilliantly in harmony, a display of fervour
The mosaic of echoes dismantled by fate's clutches
Changes imminently, unavoidably, flawlessly

Alas, the decadent phantoms of the days long gone
In their irrefutable devotion to their fallacious lord
Seek naught but to extinguish the astral avatar
Embodied within the solitary luminaire, ever vigilant

Does the final line of defence lay dormant even now
As the messenger of the deep beyond revivifies
The illusion dispelled, disenchanted, disengaged
Situation growing direr, the peacekeeper absent

Sealed within a decrepit maze, the mirrored world
Drawing parallels between the unimaginable still
Lost its own essence in the steadily rising entropy
For none are safe; the fabric of reality is wounded

Tendrils escape from the fissure, liberated at last
Come what may, the very barriers between realms
Once separating life and death, light and darkness,
Brought down in a prismatic flash of scintillation

And as that which tore this rift open runs rampant
The spectres of the past in their perpetual undeath
Whisper but a single innocent inquiry of naiveté
"May we reclaim our corporeal selves once more?"

An epiphany unlike most defeats wishful thinking
The clairvoyant beholder, the ever-present observer
Held their answer for as long as the currents of time
Although hope succumbs last, what is after hope?

Thus, in the demoralising wake of the bitter truth
Let the untamed flames of fury loose, such tragedy
Doom befalls the woeful, weary and withered worlds
For the inconspicuous spark has ceased its motion

The end justifies the means in the mind of madness

There's no reason to try and sugarcoat my feelings,
You hurt me.

The weirdest part about it is you convinced yourself,
By just not saying anything, and keeping up a facade,
That somehow, just maybe,
It would hurt less then just ending things finite.

Instead, you kept up the dream, the idea in my mind,
With hints, here and there that maybe things were different,
Taking up space in my bed, my mind, and against my body,
Tell me truly, how could I know that your feelings were a mirage,
A mercy to my own, by your admission?

Looking back it, with how much it stings to think,
That when I awoke with your limbs,
Draped around my neck and waist,
I smiled, and nestled into your embrace,
Only to know just a while after,
That it was meaningless in intent.

In fact, what cut me so deeply,
Is your anger that I kept you there, after the fact,
Cornered you in my presence,
When the reality of it is I laid in my bed,
Believing you wanted to be there,
And the fear you'd leave at any moment.

Reflecting on it all, it's peculiar how you speak about me,
I never knew that things never clicked,
Because you held me in your arms and kissed me so deeply,
After we broke up, and we're sitting in your car,
Or when you tell me how you want to run away together,
Start anew, in a place so foreign to us.

With each moment of intimacy my hope soared,
Surely that kiss, surely that desire to leave it all behind with me,
I dreamed so desperately that the fall in responses to my calls,
Must surely be an issue of conflicting time,
But it was an issue of conflicting interest, in the end.

Maybe most of all, the most simplest of all,
When I say I love you, and you say it back,
And I tell you how much I'd love to keep you in my life,
Only for you to tell me, months after our split,
That there was nothing really there,
And that you could never love me.

That's what really hurt me.