u/Embarrassed-Hat260

The father, the brother, the bloodline, the son, the canvas, the artist and the damage it’s done, the addict, the failure, the f*ck up, the ex, the loyalty that stood through the storms and wrecks.

The smart, the stupid, the win, the loss, the pendulum that swings to measure the cost. The present, the distant, the broken, persistent, the grit in the marrow that stays so resistant.

The giving, the greedy, the caring, the needy, the pace of the pulse that’s frantic and speedy. The happy, the furious, the dark, the sad, the direct collision of the good and the bad.

The shot, the kneecap, the breath in the chest, the stubborn defiance that handles the test. The easy road buried, the hard road climbed, the push through the concrete, the tearing of time.

The honest, the liar, the truth, the fake, the second that I live is the second I break, the phantom tomorrow, that never was mine, is the hold on the now at the end of the line.

The fable is fractured and the alter is bare, a funeral procession for the castles in air. The future we fathered, the dreams we designed are the skeletons rotting in the back of my mind. The pull from the longing is a gravity well. It’s a beautiful heaven turned into functional hell, I’m clenching at echoes, at ghosts and at shreds of a vision so vibrant but clinically dead.

You offer the olive, the hand and the plea, to anchor the wreckage of you and of me. I mimic the mercy, I whisper the grace, while the bile of rejection burns in my face. It’s a cordial poison, a civilized sting, to bless all the comfort your new lover will bring. I tried to drown the sorrow, to smother the lack but the agony swims and claws into my back.

And while you drifted to daylight, to vivid excess, I remain a curator of joylessness. Your peace is the shrapnel, your smile is the knife, in the gallery of loss and forfeited life. Death would be shorter, a final degree but purgatory’s vistas are all that I see. I’ve a front row ticket, a premium view, to the heartache produced and directed by you.

The crystal so cold, a predictable heave. A fever I managed to finally leave, I’ll shatter the glass and silence the spin, and tame every demon that rattles within. The system was savage, the cravings were loud but I walked from the static that pierced through the cloud. It was a war, a trifle, a tactical fight against a chemical phantom in the dead of the night.

But quitting the woman? A deadlier draft, a surgical sinking of a leaking old craft, she’s wired in the marrow, she’s etched into the neural. A withdrawal more wicked, complex and plural. If the pipe was a problem I could handle alone, then she’s the echo that lives in the bone. And in silence I’m sweating the stain, of a ghost in the kitchen and a throb in the brain.

The drug was a nuisance, the binge was the joke, compared to the stifle and the absence she woke. I can starve out the poison, and hollow the vein but I can’t decipher this brand of pain. I conquered the powder, I pushed back the spree to end up drowning in memories of what used to be. Now the chemistry is quiet, the shadows are thin. But the habit of her is the one I can’t win.

A legion of lonely, that aliases manipulated but the impulses can’t hide. The digital shroud from the fractured inside, a shift through the handles, the avatars, the names, playing juvenile mental and parasitic games. But I can spot the switch, and decipher the glitch in the sterile barrage of your hatful little pitch. You cower in silence behind a screen that’s cracked, to stalk and harass what your character lacks.

Was the nursery vacant? Did the tenderness fail? And leave a spirit so empty and frail, did someone inflict a permanent dent? And the bile you spew a receipt for rejection you spent. Or is it a fable your own punchline is unstable, that only your own echo ever enabled.

Some jests are a satire, a laughable strike, but yours is a venom that is wholly unlike. It’s the notice you miss, and the focus you piss into digital voids with a snake like hiss, you’re so desperate for meaning and that’s why you would rather, earn a feast or a famine from the ire you gather. You’d rather be hated, than nothing but air, just to prove to yourself that someone is there.

The fables are strange with a limitless range, where the wounded turns victor in a grotesque exchange, deep down in the marrow, a scar so deep, that pushes out aches while the rest of us sleep.

The silver flicker is a bitter predation, a scripted affliction for a blinded nation. A marketed mismatch as destiny calling, but when the gravity shifts the hammer starts falling, you surrender the mercy, the honor, the vein, just to drown in the static and swallow the rain. The songs are a forgery, hollow and thin. A saccharine venom soaking into the skin.

I gave up the marrow, the will and the vow. To a specter of nothing who’s vanishing now. The trust was a tally, the faith was a toll, for a journey that fractured the depth of the soul. The exits are brutal, a surgical tear, leaving the echos of questions no one will hear. The exit is honest, a blunt force decree, the only direction is somber and free.

No soul is companion, no spirits are pairs, in a universe vacant nobody cares. The stone is a finish, the clay is the bed, beyond all the fables and the lies that they fed. We are orbits of dust in a limitless void, with the daydreams of soulmates completely destroyed.

The avenue is quiet, the suburbs are still behind the facade of a tempered young will. A businessman nodding, a pillar of trust, with a basement full of bones and a soul full of rust. He painted the humor in a thick white design, but the edges were pointed, with a predatory line. No rounded compassion, no softness of face, just the brutality that’s haunted this place.

He offered the handcuff, a rope and a rile, always under the weight and words with a politicians smile, the trick was a tether, the trap was the real show. And 29 young souls were dragged down below. The torture was gleeful, a clown in the dark extinguished their lives, like a dying blue spark. Young men in their prime, and the boys in their bloom, became shrouded statistics in a suffocating room.

The fathers were shouting, the mothers were scared, the police saw the businessmen and never really cared. They trusted the badge, and the status he wore, and the clown was bolting the crawl space door. When the cops hit the pavement, a tireless grind, they unraveled the chaos of a shattered mind, they tracked down his van, they followed the stink, and the reality would push them almost to the brink.

Then came the exhuming, the shovel and silt, and the physical proof of his limitless guilt. The grizzly assembly, the counting of jaws, all under the watch of a horrified law. The dirt gave up its secrets it struggled to keep. While the officers stumbled and struggled to sleep. Now the greasepaint is cracked, and the crawl space is deep. And a city of ghosts is all that they keep.

The campus is quiet, a pacific mist, where the ghost of the future and innocence kissed. He waits at the Volks with a sling and a plea, he’s the ultimate fiction of a man you should trust. A scholar, a lover, a charismatic light. He carries the day, to butcher the night. The smile is a scalpel, precision and grace, hiding feral intent under a civilized face.

The impulse is rising, a tide that won’t stem, as he hunts for the brightest, the most beautiful, the gem. He ruptured the sanctuary, he shattered their peace, he thirsts for the vanished and refuses to cease. Two times he vanished, he leapt and he ran, a cunning of ego, this shadow of a man. But the room at the sorority, the shriek and the stain, proved to the entire world the monster broke loose from his chain.

The tally is unknown, a numerical dread, buried deep in the mountains with the names of the dead. Was it thirty? Or maybe hundreds? The true count is a blur. A shroud of the lives and the girls that they were, the betrayal is biological, a fracture of faith, that a brother could function as a merciless wrath.

Now the gallows are waiting, and the current is set, to cancel his life and repay the debt, for the families now stand in the permanent rain, while the earth kept its secrets of limitless pain. We stare at his picture, we search for a clue, but the eyes of this monster are perfectly blue. The monster is smiling and his passenger is gone, and only the doubt is what carries on.