The ash from his head drains down on his cheeks
From the silk that he used to call hair.
His rosy complexion turns pale in deception
From light which his eyes cannot bare.

He tricks himself slowly with raucous and riddles;
Intrigued to believe that he lives.
But the day is a cynical bully to show him
Whatever life lived isn't his.

His ethereal mind is a chemical plant
And minutia is squeezed from his psyche.
His heart is still pumping, though oddly offbeat,
And his eyes dilated by night.

He's not catatonic, but far from his will.
Absolved from life into sin.
And his conscience is pounding on the side of his skull,
But his nerves are unbearably thin.

He's bent along bedposts and struck to his knees,
His hands reek of prayer and faith.
But all trace of his focus is calmed by disturbance
And commission diverts to a waste.

Bereft of all hope is the beat in his chest,
And his soul will not stand for the grief.
When alcohol will not face down the demons
The night is no lucid relief.

And purple becomes the tender collage,
When colors converge onto him.
For the pulse is a curse as he gently inserts
This drug into infected skin.

Extinct like the passion of Romeo’s blade,
As the night withdraws from his eyes.
A sadness returns to that satchel of youth
As misery lilts by his side.

There’s no subtle encore for failures like these,
No mentor to weld his mistakes.
So he dies with the fire iced over inside,
And we care, just for sanity's sake.

Don't worry about him or for him at all;
A pseudonym carved into sand.
Buffed slowly by wind and then covered again
By the page of a much better man.
 
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