Posthumously Me

I spent nights of violence

wrestling with demons,

scribbling truths on napkins,

each word a battle

lost and won.

The world slept

my mind never woke

but always awake

the weight of existence and the absurdity of it all gave me that heavy chest

But they never noticed,

never cared,

while I was here.

I was just another voice in the din,

a face in the crowd, but now that I’m gone,

they sing my praises,

laud my genius,

hold my words like sacred relics.

Dissect my verses, analyze my syntax,

and claim to know the depths of my soul.

Teach my pain in classrooms,

quote my anguish at parties,

a chorus of misunderstanding.

Totally mistaking the grit and the grime,

and the blood on the page as something I didn’t love, because it couldn’t hurt me.

For fuck’s sake, I spent my days chasing shadows,

grappling with the mundane,

tied to the grindstone

a cigarette in hand and the bottle of my solace close to empty.

And the world oblivious and indifferent to their misinformed applause.

Maybe the despair wasn’t so quiet, I did write with the ink of my own blood

Screamy paper and deaf tone dreams, was all it was

I never heard them just as they never saw me

It’s only when I was gone, the chair was empty,

and the light had faded,

they came to notice me

the brilliance in the mess,

the truth in the madness.

Pouring over my every word

like holy scripture,

seeking meaning in the chaos.

They say my name with an unfamiliar reverence

toast to my genius and tortured soul.

They find beauty in the pain,

wisdom in my godawful ramblings,

calling me a prophet of the damned, a seer of the sordid.

Holy fuck, are they misguided.

It’s the cruel joke God plays on us

for it’s not until the silence settles, and dust on the pen gets blown through the paper with the echoes of my last breath, they finally hear it.

But they only see the surface, at best

the pretty lies they tell themselves,

and wrap my chaos in neat little boxes,

polish the rough edges,

making me a saint

when I was always a sinner at best.

And there it is,

clear as a living day,

they praise me but get it all wrong.

They don’t know the man behind the prose

the heart that was black and blue

or the life that bled into those lines.

They didn’t know me then and they cannot know me now, son.

In death, I am god

but not in the way that matters.

They see the legend,

but miss a man stumbling through the dark,

trying to make sense of nonsense,

searching for a spark in the ashes

while laughing his ass off the entire ride.