. . . ___-the angstiest poem in the world-___ . . .

i look at the rat as it scuttles across the floor

i am like that rat
but i see myself in its eyes
and i see that unlike me,
the rat has a soul...

my reflection comes, bent and estranged
like my life

a life less ordinary...yet strange
~
a soul tainted but still a soul

depraved and perverted the way they like it
_this_ is acceptable, they tell me.

the only tears and rips we will allow are ones unseen,
in your mind
in your heart

in the blackest residues slumbering in your deepest essence....
they talk to me about power
responsibility

I know what power is.
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I have seen them broken down, all broken down.

they have no dreams

they have no hopes

I have no dreams.
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Not anymore.

I look at the pieces of the mirror on the floor...
shattered, broken...

My dreams were shattered when I met you
i should feel sympathy, but I don't.

you didn't.

I had hopes

I look back.

I had dreams

a thousand times, I look back, and wonder.

My fantasies perverted by your hand

Twisted...
Warped

skewed inherently

fundamentally

the only things you knew were what was wrong

the only things I DO are what is wrong

and I do it because I love you...

more than you will ever know

because even though my heart is blackened...and mummified

you have never known what it is like to have one.

You dont know
Love to you is heated bodies piled up under sheets of satin and silk...

Summer passions flared by the heat of the moment

but it ends up as hated bodies...piled beneath mounds of leaves and soil

You have never loved...you never will
Yet I give you mine
entropic passions with flies' eggs as a catalyst

Why?
~

Let me be the maggot of your eye

a parasite sitting in your chest

thriving on the thing that makes you dead

but you do not know death

not like the mouse in the corner of my room

I left it there for three weeks

just because the smell reminded me of you

the mouse who scurried to get to the sublime
the mouse that u broke his spine
in the trap u cleverly set
I serious doubt the mouse will forget...

it bears the marks to remember through time

like the thorns of a rose

but has no mind remaining to mark the passing.

I have a mind

and soon, I will have the markings.

My skin
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I have lost my soul
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No
Not lost
Merely misplaced
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Under a rock,...decaying and forgotten
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like a slug
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an earwig...
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or some other such agent of decay

of morbidity....
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i am an agent of death
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they laugh at my black clothes, but it is a uniform.

it is a badge of honour.

They fear it

because it consumes them

they fear me more than anything they have feared before

it draws them...in to my emptiness
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if this is to be the end, then it is the only end which can be had

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and I embrace it

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with my chitinous lips

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bony fingers clutching a dead rose to my gaunt chest

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and a grin on my death's head.

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- Improvised by Draco, Cthulu, Moonight, LIFE-, Dyer and the other inhabitants of #poetry who contributed their angstiest lines in realtime!