The Ego Death Of The Poet

- The Seasons Of Grief: Chapter III - Poem IX -

I fought through the heavy mist to reach the cemetery light,

Dying tulips on the gravestones, so many had lost the fight

Tried to carry the weight of all this sadness I bore,

My bones broke as the decay reached my core

Soaked clothes clung to my battered frame, my nerves bitten to the frost,

I stopped trying to make things work; the compromise was timed to be lost

Isabella said, “It isn’t right, what they’re doing to you,”

I know, but I’ve already dug the grave, and everything had already been run through

So, how much grief did you think I’d bear before the soil consumed?

Before the coffin broke and took my name, that means you?

This tragedy will die with me while the gun holds its breath,

Here lies the ego death,

Of the ill-fated poet

I’ve been in therapy for three hundred and thirty-one weeks,

Yet I’m still clawing at the surface of the pain that makes me weak

I don’t know if one day I’ll be good enough to be a husband to another,

Or if I’m strong enough to wear the mantle of a father

I’ll die on the altar in the church where I was crucified,

I prayed for proof of life, but death was all who replied

The pews sat empty, save for the shadow of my past,

I begged the dead to tell me how long this pain would last

I wouldn’t marry me, with all this baggage you might have to carry,

The cost was my youth, my marrow, and my honorable obituary

This quiet resentment I learned from another, and you don’t deserve what I can’t give,

All I can hope now is that every time I mess up, you have the grace to forgive

They said I abandoned them, but it was they who left me last,

White knuckled, I clung to the ship until the drop of the mast

Every breath I was allotted was fleeting and grim,

So, every day I ask if you still want me, despite my resemblance to him

How long did you think I’d stay before I finally let go?

Before I bury the man that lurks in the crevices of my shadow?

My name means a descendant of you,

I’ve almost killed myself trying to become someone new

The asylum crumbled, the spirit fled, and the doors locked behind,

But I’m still here, a ghost of me, wandering and undefined

I’m mad as hell because I once loved this place, the graveyard of my water-colored youth,

Now I’m crawling out of my grave, to exit the crypt and find some kind of truth

In a namely death, it’s a burial rite, a requiem etched in stone,

Five graves, one boy, all I almost joined with my bones

I’m still haunted, I wake up every night in a sweat of the gun’s breath,

Here lies the ego death,

Of the ill-fated poet