the value of a man with a gun

Thoughts beat as sledgehammers,

sieging my fragile, near-dawn mind,

The answer to the question is easy,

and therefore too hard to accept.

 

Wordsmiths are not what they were,

in the gun-slinging days,

when words oft failed.

 

No one values a man with a gun,

like they value one who can still

cheat

lie

beg

and generally be a scum-sucking

waste

of

flesh.

 

First-hand experience is trump,

and I can throw around bowers

with the kings of the underworld.

 

What happened to the sweet genius?

Where lay the inoocent, golden locks

of my youth?

 

When does a broken man,

oft mistaken for a saint,

and too hard on himself,

qualify for ascension?

 

The devil is in the details,

and she is dancing so lovely,

tonight.

 

The battle is between loneliness,

a long-neglected sense of destiny,

and the warm feeling of security;

nothing else matters.

 

Life doesn't go around handing out lemons,

it squirts them in your eye

while it kicks the piss out of

the useless, slowly-dying gas-bag

we all seem to refer to as the human body.

 

That's life,

and we deserve it.

the tender ego

It's a burden,

assumed omniscience,

which inflates the tender ego.

 

Watch as the personality,

breaks down on the side,

of the common road,

under its weight.

 

The solution doesn't surface,

a submarine long since torpedoed;

the death rattle of your love life.

 

Maybe there wasn't a solution.

Imagine years spent

three steps ahead

only to realize that

the race is a lie.

 

Three steps ahead became

three steps above or away,

but it didn't matter in the end,

it was only relative to zero.

 

And now who is laughing? 

I can't see them but I hear

strange, strange echoes

of love and ignorance

not so blissful

or needed.

 

There was a point to the story,

I told myself,

as I lay down under the siege

of an enigmatic stream of consciousness,

that somewhere is broken,

and all too complete.

 

It's bent on destruction,

it's own, yours, or the delicate

break-down of my loved ones.

 

A battle tonight became a victory,

and the wolves danced as sheeps

following a failure too obvious and unsung.

 

Silence is golden,

even when shrouded by

bronze defeat.