Rewards

I really hope I’m man enough 

To die living somewhere new

And I don’t know the ‘where’ will matter

Or if I’ll like where I have to go

I just hope you’ll know the truth of things

And the breaking ice on which I stood

That you were always all I’d never leave

But I’ve stayed as long as I could. 

You’ll never come to care about me

Not in the ways I think you should

But I am just a hollow tree and if I fall in an empty forest

Can you hear the splinter of the wood? 

Or is there only silence and is that all there’ll ever be?

Is this just the blind man’s story

Of the lights he’ll never see?

I like to think it isn’t

That the fire might still build

But its flickers fade in winter wind

And I know the will won’t stay. 

Because I only have to close my eyes

I only have to blink

And I’ll no longer carry the lingering ghost that is so like an anchor

And every anchor sinks.

But what if I don’t want that end

Or some fleeing pain?

What if the ache of every iron undead ghost

Will make life less lonely when it stays?

I like to think that’s possible

Because I know where that other road ends

In the shirt pocket once full, now empty,

Over a still heart on which fantasies depend. 

The funny thing is…

I know I can let those stories go

And kill the lives I’ll never lead. 

But the hope for the fantastical ending is all

A representation of what ‘happiness’ might mean. 

In the hole of a heart now a handkerchief stored

To stop a river’s lost love that is flowing like blood. 

In black tides that rise high like the seas

I’d drown swimming and floundering and failing to hold

That joy, the life, the love so bright,

That is imprisoned in another man’s memories.

Because you cannot storm the castle 

Not the one that was never there. 

And you cannot lose what you never had

Or eat from a table of kings

Because you are every word unsaid and every life unlived

And to the very finite and infinite end, you’ll be damned to the life that you’ve led.