The Narrow Path

I had once gone to London on vacation,
walking along the Thames, far, far away in dreams,
or maybe in fragments of a life that once was,
or could have been.

There was powder on my face,
a devil's trumpet in my hand,
and so many warnings,
but youth is deaf,
and wisdom,
a ghost cloaked in the unseen years ahead.

I was muscle-bound,
well-dressed,
a leather belt cinching a polished facade.
Yet beneath, I was already unraveling.

It was autumn, I remember,
the leaves spiraling downward,
their slow decay mirroring my own.
I traveled far and long,
but every road circled back
to the same hollow place within.
No matter the distance,
I found myself nowhere.

I didn’t bother with church,
didn’t bother with God.
What truth could be found
in those crowded halls of borrowed piety,
where saints sinned on Monday
and begged forgiveness by Sunday morning?
They called me empty,
but what was emptier
than pretending to be whole?

I chose to wear my sins honestly,
to be a devil in daylight
rather than a saint in shadows.

The sun rose and fell;
I shouted at it from rooftops,
asking if it was God,
a celestial typo—
Son or sun,
what difference?
I begged for truth,
but the rays only cast longer shadows.
The darkness became my answer.

Home was a battlefield of bloodlines,
brothers who once laughed
but now can’t stand the sight of each other.
One I loved
but now only know as a stranger,
a father who lived dead outside himself,
and a mother who died inside herself.
What was left for me there,
in that house of half-lives?

The narrow serpentine path wound through us all,
a chain of pain and loss,
the echoes of dreams
too brittle to hold.

I lived alone,
though the walls carried their voices.
Fresh-painted,
I covered them with posters
of lives I could never touch.
My connection to the world
was as fragile as the paper tacked to plaster.

The bed sagged beneath me,
the side table groaned under the weight of cheap comforts.
Life slipped through my fingers,
sand spilling from a shattered hourglass.

I thought there would always be time.
Time to love,
time to heal,
time to live.
But the clock was silent,
its hands unmoving,
and my heart,
grown cold,
could no longer hear it.

So here I stand,
shouting at a sun that doesn’t answer,
searching for light
in a world that only gives me
its shadows.