Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead

Nay, I swim with sea-demons

no sweet summer tuned radio

over my sunless desertscape

how does it burn without the sun?

we met one strange summer

in a regular tangle of sticky webs

you had the air of angels sweet but I--

drowned with the damned spirits

in lava oceans fearing your--

foreign static frequency

and grey-green eyes

(I swear they are even if you--

think otherwise): storms

calm ones, calmer than my--

raging coals, empty and dead

you speak of souls like you believe

always an optimist in pessimistic

skin of ivory and titanium mesh...

All suffer and none should have to. But why not? If suffering makes life seem more real or more abstract, both circumstances are infinitely more bearable than the disturbing reality of mundane work-to-live-then-die-bored life.

As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.

Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.

In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,

An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.

All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,

I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.

Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,

Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.

This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

Sometimes it can be as brutally overwhelming as a tidal wave flooding every orifice, the suffocation, the pressure, the immensity of this damnable depression like an ocean, unsurmountable. It swallows me whole and gnaws at my very bones. It floods me over and over, drowning me over and over... It is a torturous broken record player with a scratched disc on repeat, the wailing disrupting any possible good remaining after the tsunami. It wails and wails inside my ribcage and inside my skull. I cannot make it stop.

His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.