pen flickers over notes,
jotted in doctor’s scribble indented on pressed paper mâché,
grown from rhyme schemes & stanzas structured by emotional cement and shattered pieces of bone and heart,
as if a coroner’s van were called to the scene,
complete with morticians commissioned to scrape sad brain and seared flesh from concrete,
in a vain attempt to save a soul that is too far gone.

music has grown to become my only confidant,
akin to an outgoing friend,
juxtaposed against the societal outcast who hates crowds and conversations that stem from booze.
my mind recites verses as though they were whispered through grapevines and over bated breathe,
while chaotically written characters aim to postpone what seems to be an inevitable free fall,
as if this substance induced,
cathartic repetition was my own personal purgatory.

there was once a time,
my being burned with the desire to erase this face from our plane’s existence,
to rip my vinegar voice from it’s home beneath my jugular,
and lobotomize my frontal lobe to scan every single spiteful thought from the right and left,
so as to not fly over the cuckoo’s nest built around my soul.

paper became the pillow over my mourning mouth,
and the one beneath my head.
words slither from the tongue and circle sternum & neck like a noose soaked in gasoline,
only loosening it’s grip as my pen allows.
notes cross veins,
puncturing skin to lessen the pressure beneath,
lowering the melodic drum beat originating from my aorta,
to a murmur.

an outcast rarely forgets where the isolation began,
a leper’s scars serve as a visceral reminder of what most will never experience,
and every single parent knows,
deep down inside,
us kids would’ve been better off without a dead dad,
even if your God didn’t think along those same lines.

music is my voice.
it is the razor within the apple.
it is the glass slipper I’ve been searching for.
it gave me life,
and it shall be the death of me.