Was he demented?
Yes.
Was he troubled?
Most definitely.

He was everything they are calling him.
A gambling addict.
A retired accountant.
A mass murderer.

But he was something else
In addition to all these things.

He was a terrorist.

I know that word doesn't sit well with you
Unless the person it accuses doesn't look like you
Doesn't talk like you
Doesn't live
like
you.

But this man lived a life exactly like yours.
Up until that day
He was exactly
like
you.

Normal in every sense
Of your perception of "normal."

Up until that day
He was all of these words
Except a terrorist.

Now he has committed an act of terror
Yet no one in power has called him out
As a terrorist.

I find it odd that we avoid
Words that so perfectly describe one's actions
Simply because he doesn't fit the profile
You created in your head.

I thought all this time that understanding was currency and it would
buy me reciprocity, it would buy me good faith
so i gave and gave till i deflated like a balloon
going from full and heavy to nightmarishly empty so quick and so soon
you know me well, so treat me well!
but you don't, you don't. my hell and your hell spell a hell of a hell. you know it and you wish you didn't
so it is now a bigger injustice, i can't lay blame on ignorance, you know it now
a truth interchangeable with yours! i'm hurting! i'm hurting!

you're a part of the fire now!
that can only mean i am a part of yours.

so you got it all along and it didn't save me.

I was too immersed, in love with the idea of love.

My intellect drowning in the fascination of desire.
The ideology of you manifesting the adoration I demand.

Instead deceit trickled from your throat, oozed from your lips to plug my eardrums.

The bitterness of trickery fresh on your tongue for me to taste.
Ignorance played on repeat, rehearsing the sickly sweet tune you once sang.

An epiphany of misconception. The creator of my contorted heart, over dreamed daydreams.

And now everything's beautiful
with the lovely golden kiss of autumn.

Red. Red. Red.
That's all I see.
You don't know the pain.
The ribbon tightens.
The marks are fresh.
The ribbon tightens.
The blood stains the floor.
The ribbon tightens.
The ribbon tightens more.
My vision blurs.
My breath is lost.
Then there's a new color.
Black.

I'm like a knot
in a hollow tree
With decay and rot
hidden just beneath
Which proves God can use
even the likes of me
One like a knot
in a hollow tree

I still have some branches  
with their share of green
Showing there's a chance
of life left in me
No matter how hard
the knot in the tree
Proof God can use
even the likes of me

(explicit)

**** my soul
        with poetry
           scream out my gracious name
             slay me with words
               that peel my layers
                and simultaneously
                                   drive me
                                           insane

finger me slowly, hotly
with just the right rhythm and rhyme
    push me past my
                 tender limits
                       into tongues of syntax,
                                                      sublime

a­lliterate my senses
   (in swift stac
                    c-at
                           o)
until my mind is but blank verse
    mess up my stressed
              and unstressed syllables
in unsung language, versed

I will speak to you in vowels
(the only sound
       I will be able to make)
as you stroke
   my iambic pentameter
             in the heat of frothed-up
                                                     ache

we are this heroic couplet, you see
        even if the meaning seems veiled
           no need for simile or metaphor
               as I feel your chest rise
                              in deep inhale

we are a natural paradox
       so many ironies abound
         discordant harmony
is our synaesthesia
     in visible darkness found

and I love this delicious enjambment
as your aura invisibly slips
                               into mine
our lines have no beginning,
                                 no end
    as we undo
          the boundaries
                      of time