Wishful Thinking

He never wanted to be better.
He wanted to be fed.

Flaws, sacred,
stitched into the pen,
every wound he made
repurposed into art.

He studied men
who made a virtue of damage,
who called destruction genius.

Whole, soft, burning.

They bowed like flames
at the altar of his greed.

Love was the first thing burned.

Women were just collateral.

Each woman smiled at the ruins,
convinced the smoke was incense,
the ashes a blessing.

One by one,
a string of muses,
devoured, discarded.

There is a place for him,
a mercy, a shelter,
in the bosom he mistakes for a cage.

He lives in the noise between disasters,
in the flicker before the fuse blows.

But give him what he wants.

The ones who loved him grew tired.
The ones who stayed came hungry, too.

He wrote them
with their hands still open,
wove their burdens into his laurels,
then left them holding the weight.

He mistakes noise for company,
praise for love,
a room full of faces
for proof he can stand alone.

One day,
he’ll sit,
a glass sweating in his hand,
the door swinging open, closed,
people coming, people going,
none of them looking.

He’ll drink to feel something.

Taste only whiskey,
with a hint of ash.

-AB

Song of the night – Subliming by Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners