Hollow

Can hardly mince words together. Like mincing garlic, chopping hearts of onions. I keep trying, keep going blurry blind. Like personalities don’t parse the madness; tears don’t purge the washed-outed-ness. Nothing washes clean the surface of the lines I can’t seem to write.

Images deceive me. Bring me back to blind acceptance, like if I say yes, it’ll clear this. Like if I say “I’m sorry” a thousand more times, it’ll undo the tangled lines. Like if I tell one more truth now, it’ll purge the lies.

But green foliage is the last of places I’m lying in. Burnt wood and charcoal dust and stray leaves that didn’t rot in the meltdown. Stray stems that failed to stretch sun-ward. Stray flowers that bloomed but came to nothing.

A flash of color and life that withers and rots with no fruition.

Every angle I pass by, every corner that I cut clean off, every way I try to unthink myself — I’m right back where I was.

I want to take back the past. Rewrite the first draft. Make a better scene, more eloquent, smooth and elegant. Rephrases initial phrases, re-stage integral phases. Replace hollow metaphors and clichés and things I didn’t even think.

This was the run-through, right? Dress rehearsal and our mess-ups didn’t count?

God, I wish that were true. Wish there were more compassion than nihilism, more empathy than self-preservation, more hope than distrust, more love than fear.

I wrote dark dystopic apocalypse because I was trying to envision a better world.
I think I failed.

Gomen’nasai