My Own Regrets

Is it too late to take it back?

Dripping blood from mangled flesh

Hanging upside down

Deep, solid puddles of the blackest red

Is it too late to take it back?

Your wrists in mine, broken with a twist

Crackled screams as your ribs caved in

The blackened bruises already showing

Is it too late to take it back?

Flesh singed with a flick of a flame

Putrid smells of rotting ash

Drifting pieces, melting off, disintegrating

It’s too late to take it back.

Your body’s cold, numb to my touch

It shows the years of my own regret

Hanging upside down, tied up and beaten

Throat split, hanging open in useless flaps

The flames lick upwards, breaking everything

The horror and nightmare of every sound

Tormented screams echo inside me

I grind my fingertips into my own flesh

It’s too late, much too late

But I’m still sorry just the same.

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Sometimes it feels like I'm flailing, falling, looking for a place to grab hold.  The endless air drifting above and below me.  It's not a free fall, no, much slower.  Much less fun.

Though every once and awhile, the words form around me and start to make sense.  Even if the poetry doesn't come out right, it makes my brain settle.  The ground comes back underneath my feet and I begin to climb again.  No one is hurt, no one suffered.  The feeling that pulsated through my brain is now on paper, some of the darkest or lightest words I may have ever written sprawled before me.  Is it worth it to display myself so publicly?  Will they get what I'm originally speaking of?  Or will some English teacher twenty years from now stumble across my work and teach it as a metaphor of something that is so far off base, so far removed from the original point?

Artwork stuns me, sometimes.  Baffles me and makes me feel so small and huge at the same time.  The overwhelming feeling is also underwhelming - the world is at my fingertips, but I'm floating hundreds of miles away.  May the window to my soul make someone else reflect on their own, may the opening of my words make someone's pulse resonate with mine.

This is me.  This is not me.

It's all very existential.  And that's my mood:  Existential.