Slither

Too much time spent screwing around,
Lost in what I never wrote down,
Trying to find the faith in me,
The art and soul, a boy’s heart freed,
Release from pain that’s trapped and caged,
My only escape the words on a page.

Just insert here the world I see,
Doubts that strip away belief,
The feelings of an uphill battle,
Anxiety rippling, restless and rattled,
The bare-bone fears and unshed tears,
And desperate screams that no one hears:

I’m worried that I’m all alone,
Atop a throne of sticks and stones
That I’ll never truly find my way,
That I’m the one who built this cage;
The real me just too hard to see,
Fighting always duress from dead dreams -
That I’ll never amount to all that much,
But that if I do, it’ll never be enough.

The lions smell my blood and wait
For the day I turn to greed and hate,
For the moment when I crash and break,
For the instant I can no longer take
The pressure/need to be more than great;
For the snakes to slither in a place
Of prophecy lost in a desert of waste,
With potential piled in a mound of mistakes,

Revealing all that could not make itself live.