Father of Madness

“They say time heals all wounds.”

Who in the fuck are they?

Some bureaucrats of grief, clocking in, clocking out, wielding the second hand like a scalpel, deciding when the wound has been stitched,

when the blood should dry,

when the rage should settle into something softer.

Time—the prison, the con artist, the liar.

It doesn’t heal. It magnifies.

It twists the knife while whispering lullabies.

It counts the days like a debt collector, reminding me of every second Jack no longer breathes, and every hour the bastard who gave him poison does.

And still, they tell me time is the answer.

That I should let it pass, let it work.

I want to take that very hand of time,

the well-intended, patronizing hand,

and smash it for 19 straight minutes

with a dead blow hammer,

until the gears stop turning,

until the numbers scatter like broken teeth,

until time itself finally understands

what it means to be overwhelmingly crushed. 

Miranda, devil in a hoodie, dealer for pocket change was never a scapegoat.

He was a man who knew exactly what he handed over.

I wonder if he ever wakes up sweating,

if he ever feels the shadow behind him,

if he ever senses the weight of me

staring at the back of his skull.

Sixty ways in a minute,

three hundred sixty in an hour,

eight thousand six hundred forty in a day—

I could carve my grief into his flesh.

I could become time,

the father of madness,

breaking him down into seconds,

watching him beg for a mercy

that he never gave to Jack.

But there is no justice.

Only the slow, excruciating unraveling of the world going around the sun, 

where killers breathe and sons are buried.

There is no closure, no grand moment of reckoning.

There is only the hell of waking up each day,

wishing for ghosts,

praying for gruesome vengeance,

and knowing—the only end is mine.