Amends

Guilty conscience is getting the better of me at the moment, so this is my open apology.

Recently, increasingly, I reflect on common decency,

And how that concept compares to the person that I see in me,

Cause I’ve always despaired at my failure to truly meet

My excessive moral standards, and this makes me view myself as weak,

So at some point I surrendered any hope that I could ever be

A version of myself which would make my brain feel proud of me,

Protect my mental health and keep my job, my main priorities,

Any motive beyond that relies on excess stores of energy

Which I rarely ever have, these mental scabs

I’ve picked incessantly

They finally start to bleed, a fate I knew I’d face eventually

But never really wanted to accept, I should’ve kept my stupid head inside the trench,

But got my skull blown out instead,

So do I learn? Do I grow? Do I resist the undertow?

Or do I buckle and accept that I will never truly know

How this existence is supposed to feel? Endlessly laid-low

And folded, moulded by the overbearing potency of the strain I’ve laid on my own tightly-knotted shoulders,

Where the fires of feeling raged, now slowly-dying embers smoulder,

Always burning to believe that I get wiser as I’m older

But they’re wrong; confusing apathy for some twisted means of making yourself strong,

So I apologise for being me, as I apologise for the way I see the world;

Forgive my absence from your life if you’ve noticed me recede behind my curls,

I’m sorry that I fail to be the tamer of success or the guru of stress-reduction,

Because sadly I’m closer to an emperor of excess or a king of self-destruction,

 

 

Always seduced by the ever-present suction of intoxication,

Tying my own noose with a healthy diet of nightly masturbation,

My mind forever stationed at the junction between heaven and damnation,

A man with endless talents who only ever seems to f*****g waste them,

Pacing back and forth across my empty room and basing my opinion of myself on the stupid s**t I do,

So once again I swear I’m sorry, and I’m trying to be better,

Although I know I’ll never follow my own morals to the letter,

I am trying, as I always have, to make myself believe

That there’s a reason for this gaping gap between the good and me,

I am focusing my energy on being who I was meant to be,

But failing every time because I found the door but not the key,

The consequences of jumping fences are burned into my brain

Disguised as splinters in my skin I got from cutting against the grain,

I still decide to roll this loaded die time and time again,

As if repeating the same motion might rekindle the old flame that I once knew,

We’re both human but I’ll never be like you;

Because my brain just fails to operate in the way I want it to,

But I will reject your pity, ignore all of your advice,

I want nothing but forgiveness for the way I’ve lived my life,

I want nothing but to feel as though the reason I’ve survived

Is that I’ve got a greater purpose which was hidden from my eyes,

I want to be a saving grace to those souls who truly need it,

Help you find your self-belief and find a way that I can feed it,

So it grows and it shows in the smile that is beaming from your face,

Contradict extensively advice I give to friends for free,

While fighting this calamity when I know I lack the remedy,

So I beg of you, please shelter me,

From the person I’ve been recently,

Cause my mistakes are pretty speedy and I can always feel them chasing me,

My legs are getting tired and my heart is sick of racing,

But I’m too much of a coward to just turn around and face all the regrets,

To embrace the lack of sex and respond to all those texts that I’ve ignored,

As if I was ever really busy and not just getting drunk because I’m bored,

I am genuinely sorry that I’m lacking in emotion,

Cause it makes it hard for me to understand that human devotion to one another;

Everyone is my brother but none could be my lover since the feelings that requires are sadly just not covered by my brain,

I’ll entertain the thought that I might one day go insane,

And gently wane away akin to the gently-dying flame of an abandoned candle,

Finally truly fail to handle the insidious decay that has spread in from the mantle to the core,

Work no more and simply w***e my body out to whichever substance stops life from being such a bore,

I need to change before I hit the floor and knock myself unconscious,

Cause this lack of self-control can make me noisy and obnoxious when I just want the silence of a space that is my own,

Somewhere my mind can deconstruct the anxious thoughts to which it’s prone,

This is my apology to each and all, an attempt to make amends for every time I’ve let you fall,

Or simply glazed over your problems because I didn’t care at all,

This is the way I make amends, a desperate message I can send to the world as a whole;

I am sorry.