The Other Side

So haunting, an angel in the cemetery. A dancer in the mausoleum of romance. Grace in a bitter fist. The blossoming of passion.

The taste of dried tobacco is a bullet between my teeth.

Beneath the full moon, a rose blooms, red and brilliant even in the gloom. Not redemption or acquittal, but a resurgence of violent reveries. The dew is cold, clear, shining with promises.

The scent of brittle cinnamon quiets my rage.

There is glass in my hands, in the ocean of my touch, unyielding and fragile. In flame of craving, glass bends, conforms to the careless grotesqueness of flesh and bone, morphing into a surrogate lover, a symbiotic spirit.

There is glass, and I turn it gently, scouring every contour, appraising every gleam. A precious thing, whispering truth against the maelstrom.

Begging for freedom.

For me.

Loose the chains and relinquish heavy bonds. Free the prisoner and send him to light of day.

Bask, gentle poet, in sunlight, and dance beneath the cold gaze of Luna.

The world is mine.

Hold it softly, and suck the blood from the open throat.

I want to be the bullet that brings you to your knees.

I want to carve your smile from your mouth, break the teeth that lie of happiness.

A fist falls over and over, until there is nothing but justice, shaking retribution, quivering like a flower in the blowing ash.

The hammer comes down again and again, striking true until screams are naught but whimpers.

Rage.

My rage will kill you, and it’s rage you have cultivated in me.

You have sewn your undoing, little whore.

Roses blossom in my eyes, full bloom, thick wet petals that drip honey.

I pulled the trigger, but you nestled the barrel between your teeth. I gave the answer, but it was your question.

I dug the grave at your behest.

I directed the orchestra of your hidden desires, sucked the truth into the searing light of day. I only conducted the symphony; you wrote the score.

You have sewn your undoing, little whore, and you will reap the bounty of my wrath. You will drown in the ocean of my fury. You will suck my poison dry until every vein croaks in the summer sun.

You will die, little whore, in the desert of my vengeance.

Hell has no fury like the hound that has been forgotten.

It’s all circles. I keep coming back to this point, I keep returning to this blinded revery. Your face is the start, and my rage is the end.

Rage.

Red-eyed and numb, I just can’t stop myself. I can’t keep away from this unthinking violence. Give me your blood, your flesh and fear.

Give me your life.

My love, you’ll never die. I dug the grave myself, I lowered your corpse into the dead earth. By midnight stars, I covered you between the willows of our passion. I packed you into the dirt, tucked you in with all of my shortcomings.

You, my holiest of mistakes, my most beautiful of regrets, you will not die.

My little thorn, my precious whore, sleep softly in my heart. Slumber like evil things in my dead heart, little one.

Two more vials of this poison, and I’ll beat my bloody fist into your face until you can breathe no more, until your words are choking gasps.

I hate you, little whore.

Die from me, leave me be, unholy spirit. Haunt my dreams no longer. Stray from my thoughts, and sleep easy in your grave.

I love you, precious thing.

Two more glasses of vengeance, and I’ll whisper your name until the sun burns me alive.

If I could only forget the song of your laughter.

It’s unbelievable how your touch stills me, how your smile silences me, how the memory of you lays me to uneasy rest beneath black, desert earth. I thought I had buried you long ago. I thought you were nothing more than so many bygones, so much sand through the cracks in my fingers.

I thought wrong. Story of my life.

Now I stand on the far side of an uncrossable chasm, damned until my dying day to play the forlorn madman, the lover who never was.

Damned until my dying day, and further.

Oh, I would kiss your cracked and bleeding lips if I could, lips that grinned at me like a forest spirit from your station in the celestial heights. I would kiss your lips for the first time, the last time, and then the curse would be broken.

But it was never that simple.

Damned until my dying day, and then to the depths of Hell, where I’m bound.

The curse weighs me down like an anchor, like a solid burden tied fast to my ankle, dragging me lower, lower, lower still until there is no further depth to which I may descend.

One kiss, and I’m free forevermore.

One kiss, and thrice more I am bound.

I’m not ready because I’m still holding back. I still don’t want to give you everything because I fear you’ll take it for granted.

I’m not ready because I’m selfish, and you’ve done nothing to prove yourself worthy of graceful humility.

I’m not ready because I’m proud, and all you do is humiliate me, emasculate me, turn me into a joke to tell to your drunken friends and parasitic relatives.

I’m not ready because I’m still afraid to walk into the darkness all alone, and I know once the lights go down I’ll be high and dry.

I’m not ready because you are thorn, my mortal weakness, and I can not, will not give you what you need.

You feed off of me like a thirsty leech, and your fangs drip scarlet as you smile seductively through the smoky air. You whisper promises of eternal life in my ear, but I know that your tongue is soaked in alcoholic siren-songs. When I fall asleep in your arms, I wake up in Hell, my soul ablaze and barren. Your footsteps echo down the halls of the crypt, tapping the dying pulse of my charred and withering heart. Your hands beckon me to the shadows. I can not give you what you ask, I will not.

Oh, God.

God save me. Save me.

Here, I’ve given you everything, all you’ve asked. I woke up in Hell, like I knew I would, and there you were, smiling your sweet, fanged smile.

I gave you my everything, and in return, you gave me your nothing.

It’s all meaningless. Vanity of vanities. The things we die for end up being the ones holding the gun in the end. I dreamed of what it would be like to taste your joy, feel your fears, and hold your sweet nothingness close to my heart. I dreamed this when I was younger, when I still believed.

Now, those days have come and gone, and I remain disappointed. My dreams were lies. Your joy was short-lived. Your fear was unfounded. Your nothingness was far too much for me.

In the end, let them say of me, “He was a good man.”

In the end, I hope you’ll say of me, “You were a good man, living in a bad world - that’s all. I’ll miss you.”

You were everything, you were nothing to me.

The nothingness will keep me warm in Hell.

Love could heal the world. It could boil away all the cancerous sores from all the broken hearts. It could feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

Oh, if I could just love, if I could just feel something in this soul of mine, the spiral would stop, the black road to Hell would unwind. The sky would open up before me and angels would sing.

If I had an ounce of love, I could move mountains.

But the hate is so much stronger.

What you want the most comes with a cost. Give yourself to desire, let the waves of smiling ecstasy crash over you, but there’s always a price to pay. I could have told you that, friend - I’ve been down this road time and again, and it always turns out the same way. It always ends with guilt, shame, self-loathing. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. No, it can be better than you think. Just step away from the circle of darkness, step into the light. Think beyond what they told. They only impressed their rules upon you because they fucked up first. They are the chief sinners, the devils who run the houses of the holy. They erase their mistakes through your rigid virtues. But are your virtues really such?

No. You’re living a set of arbitrary rules and guidelines, written by flawed men to keep the sheep in line. I’m sorry you’re hurting, but I’m even sorrier that you are still so blinded, so helpless in the wake of their two-decade mind fuck.

Two choices: You can have your joy, and it will be tinged with guilt. But this is only for a time. As the days go by, you will know yourself. You will learn what I learned over too many years - that what they told you was a self-serving lie. Soon, the guilt will fade and you will know nothing but the happiness, the bliss.

Or.

Or you can have your blind, bleating subservience, and it will forever be filled with regret when you finally realize that their god is dead, a lie, a shadow puppet they resurrected to keep you bent to their will.

It’s a choice between love or fear.

Fuck them and their opinions.

You choose.

You have to live with the consequences.

Too many people confuse “aloneness” with “loneliness.” I won’t make that mistake. It’s only here, in the total silence of solitude, that I know myself. I see past the masks I put on for everyone else; it’s just me and my ugly little core, alone with each other at last.

It’s dark, because I don’t need to see anything. It’s cold, because I don’t need to be warm. Love lights my way - love for self, life, others - and the burning pain of life keeps me warm on the coldest night. All I need now is a bottle of whiskey and I’m set, armed to the teeth to fight off a sea of adversities in this cold, cold place.

A bottle of whiskey and a cigarette, my weapons against the dullness of this world. That’s right - I poison myself, bringing my self closer to the end step by step, just to feel alive. That’s me - the cancerous sore on the face of society, the urban blight, the drug you take into your arms. At least when I’m dead, I’ll have my regrets to keep me warm in hell. And you? What will you have? A lifetime of holding it all inside, for the sake of your faceless god? At least I’ll have moments of real joy to light the black path to hell.

You didn’t know? Nobody told you? God is dead and we killed him - dug the shallow grave with our own greedy fingers. Your heaven, the place you’ve been looking forward to for your whole life, is desolate, a haunt for jackals and restless spirits. Without your god, even heaven is hell, and we’ll all be going there when the lights go down.

At least, for now, I’m alone.

Alone, at last.