Despair
Hope, is a fleeting thing, and cruel. More harsh than death itself, is hope. It lies. It lends false strength, in the face of insurmountable odds, only to abandon its child to the slaughter. Hope, is the birthplace of despair.
I, am the dark heart, of despair. There, I dwell, locked inside that frigid cell, chained inside a voidal hell, within myself, and lonely. Despair, is always experienced alone. Unaided, we reap the agony we’ve sown. No one can join you there, traversing that rotting wasteland Despair, within. No one can guide your faltering steps or hold your trembling hand, or smooth the path before your feet and lend you strength that you might stand. Clinging brambles of self-doubt, snare and rend my thinning flesh, shredding red, vicious claw marks, of inner demons, born afresh. These malformed weeds, with heinous thorns, pervade the bleakened nightmare deathscape, nothing else adorns. Charred and twisted, they spurt haphazard, from the jagged sheet of ice, which stretches onward without splice, beyond sight’s hope, beyond hope’s sight. Tender soles of this tenderized soul, leave behind a crimson smear, plucked out by vengeful shards of ice, to lay a trail back to the year, before, and before, before the light came crashing in, to shatter the peace with its raucous din, to crush my peaceful world of darkness, spread realization in all its starkness. Blood speaks. Its voice is the fluid warmth of the womb, far from the horror of my encasing tomb, mocking my harsh sufferings, and surroundings, “What grand realization was this, that it would bring you low, that it would rend you so?” It asks, although it knows, and it basks, in the agony it sows, waiting to reap its harvest of my tremulous tears, and punishing me in the retelling, the reliving, the consummation of my fears. I drag the freezing air into my lungs, the jolt of a thousand lashing tongues, of scalding flame. Burn my lips on unspeakable cold, icicle words, anything but bold, vomited forth in a rush of desperation, marked by thick clouds of condensation, “I found life, life within my wasting body. I found that I live, even as I die. Given this, then I must try, and live, and glory in the blessed curse of existence, beyond the chains of expectation, beyond the mold of ancestry.” Blood shrieks. No longer merely my own, now there is more to join in the moan, that which was spilt by the razor edge of my idealistic dreamchasing. Voices rise in yammering cacophony, branding the blame all over my shivering body. I never meant it to be this way. How could I know that I needed it? Their hate is as blind as the love that preceded it, the love that I trampled and spit upon. Merciless, I seized a single thing for myself, a life despite my fading health, a hope, a dream, a blazing shadow of what I should be. But you see, so doing, I crushed everything that I had built around me, leaving only the naked truth of my existence, a frantic scramble for meager subsistence, and the guiding star of my life. I am free, and lonely in my freedom. The dream, it led me away, from the path of company and comfort, away from the road they were willing to walk, away, yet not astray. No matter. Still forsaken, I am alone, chasing the cold comfort of a shadow, hounded and lashed by the flailing whips of hope. Across the wasteland Despair I lope, lone. I am the dark heart. . .
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