Every now and then I fixate on the deaths of gods and kings. Maybe I should try looking outside my heart for once. Through all this time I’ve found that out here in the astral field, no one reigns supreme. I walked the plane of symbols without meaning, stepping in and out of graves that weren’t mine. The air grew thinner with each passing breath as I scraped my weighted sole across chalk outlines. What if this is all that I get? What if I’m the last one out? I can’t stand to think of what happens next. We sleep in body bags. The shrines have collapsed, and they can’t be put back together. Our hearts can’t prevent fate, so what fucking use is there in drawing maps that only lead to dead weight, when we’re just running an endless marathon, only to dig our heels into last place? The structures that govern death are making room for another. We triumph under the knowledge that someone was listening, but when we know that none of it matters, how do we make sense of ourselves? How do we move on without a word when the guillotine hangs overhead? Andromeda draws near, pulling us to rapture. The clock won’t turn back. Our hearts can’t prevent fate. I dragged a corpse from the shore to the setting sun. I buried it in the sea, and loaded my gun. Nothing will save me. No one to make things alright again. I burned so many bridges that I don’t even know where I stand. I lived in the eye of the storm, and I want to leave, even if it kills me. I want to make sense of it all, but I’m broken and weary and ready to know demise. I saw everything, but I wired my jaw shut. I cut my tongue on broken glass with see-through words and the stones you threw at them, but this is all I can do, so I bleed onto pages and pretend that everything is fine, because if I don’t live a lie, then I can’t live at all. This arrangement won’t work for me, I can’t breathe without the mask. I’m learning the truth of the one thing I fear: love can’t stop death. The clock won’t turn back. Love can’t stop death.

I am a tragedy in the works, a piece of filth in the making. It seems I have run out of worth, the heat death of everything you’ve ever worked for, as if predetermined to be your fool, to be your every mistake realized, to live out the cruel joke you played on me, and every regret that you left in me. How could you do this to a child? Robbed of all self-worth and self-concept by your millenarian horse-blinded ambitions that you know deep down won’t save you. When the stomach can’t bear the weight, it comes up in bile and blood. I don’t want to be who I am. I can’t take what I’ve become. I built my crucifix using tools that you gave to me, and then you dragged me through your fucking tired cliché just to feed from your faith in me. Deprived of a life to learn lessons from, I watched every sky turn grey, then black. Now every good time is gone, replaced with heartbreak and pain, so fuck your god I will never come back. When the senses start to dull, what fucking use am I? I speak in shattered voices under the weight of the closing off of arms. I’ve known the misery, I was born underneath it. If I find your venom in my wrist, I’ll cut it open if I have to. You curved my back to fit me in your image, then forced me to walk on broken legs… and when your world is burning down, I’ll be the one with the black match. Through you, I have become the embodiment of entropy.

Bitter ends drip out of my second tongue. It knows all the wrong words to say. I can’t remember which mouth I used to speak. I’m learning to love the taste of my own bile. An endless trail of witnesses will hide every lie that brought you to my home. There is no real me. There never was. I leave with scissor blades embedded in my throat. I obsess. I need satisfaction that only dead cells can provide. If I can taste blood then I know that I’m still alive. I wanted to speak, but every time I tried I’d found that the words had escaped me. I saw you leave and my blood ran cold, but I still couldn’t let you forget me… and if nothing ever changes, then daylight starts again, and the draft will erase all evidence of the crime… and if I was dead inside, then at least I was something, but my name won’t mean shit when it’s dragged through the mud. What is living when I don’t feel real? What is pain in the absence of joy? What is death when my life is the defect? What if silence doesn’t cancel the noise? The answers won’t mean anything if I refuse to let them into my heart. I walk (assembly line) to the mercy seat. Days have lost all their meaning. It all feels the same to me. I’m drowning in truths that I refuse to let out. I’m choking on every reminder of what this is all about. Your mouth tastes like graves to me. This is a self-surgery with no anaesthetic. I need to see the burning remains inside myself. Somewhere along the way, I sabotaged my chance at life. I built walls that caved in under pressure and turned around to see nobody there at all. Leave me (in the cold grip of your arms). Believe me (you’ll never be safe from harm). What do I say when it doesn’t fucking matter? We’re always stuck in vicious cycles. We lose ourselves in the broken bone patterns. They’re not setting, the bones are not setting into place. Though I tried, I can’t live my life for you. There’s nothing that I said that I wouldn’t do. I reached deep into the back of my mind. I stared in disbelief to find my fingerprints on your back. I obsess over the ones I’ve scared away. I make tombs out of the stones in my way… and I’ve learned to bear the roaches that hide inside my chest: a metamorphosis into everything that you detest. This is the sound of the void taking place inside of me. This is the empty vessel that cannot speak with honesty. This is the autopsy for every life I took. When I live on borrowed time, I know that I’ll die alone.

Fuck everything that made me what I am today. No comfort in this sarcophagus. No room to breathe with airborne pathogens in our lungs, but hindsight sees in fucking panorama now, but still we part the crowd to make way for the king of nothing, as we’ve done for generations while the wound keeps bleeding still. This fucking mess that has transpired, like a virus of the mind, hiding truth to leave us blind, but your crooked smile says more than words could. When sympathy gets the better of me, I like to think there’s hope for someone like you, but when I’ve lived my life under your abuse, I can’t help hesitating to even call you human. I’ve seen bodies (like flies) in morgues, dropping dead quicker than ever before. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be so cruel to your own kind. Dethroned, your empire falls, your honor burns from the flame you started. Dethroned, you die in shame, another tyrant succumbs to a tyrant’s fate. There’s no word that can give us closure to all our grief, because we buckled under all its weight. It’s not right, I can’t live with what it’s done to me. Eyes gazed as eyes lost light. Hands held hands to speak their love then pass away. It’s fight or die now, so what will it be? We never found a reason to make thrones out of ash, but we were never afforded the chance to make ashes of thrones. We’re stuck in a state of existential dread. There’s no life worth living if it’s only waiting to be dead. If we were human at all, we’re not human anymore. If we don’t win the battle, we sure as hell won’t win the war, and if at the end we’ve found no meaning to life, then where does that leave us when we die? I once thought I knew... I know better now.