The Beginning of the End … J. Luke Herman

by J. Luke Herman

Here I hold onto what I know will be lost, As I wait with what’s left of my broken self, ‘Til the tolling of the bells calls them forth, Mustering all my strength so I can fight one last time, One last time for the fickle heaven I wish I could live in forever, Before I watch my personal paradise burn in ashes that fly away from my fingertips, Burning in the inferno of the decisions I made to try and escape, Escape the fiends that caused me so much pain, The monsters I couldn’t defeat, The monsters I couldn’t run away from, The monsters I created, Now they come back for me, To take me back to the hell curated specifically for me while I ran toward my fragile refuge, The hell that I tried to escape, And now I know better than I did before, What sort of demons one can create to try and ease the pain, And I can See them, Smell them, Hear them, While they laugh and pull me back into the nether reaches I crawled out from, While they Smash,

Break, Burn That which I wanted to hold onto so desperately, And the real tragedy now is that I know now what I did to sculpt their vicious forms, And what I should have said and done to prevent their birth, But what is in the past cannot be undone. So I stand here, waiting at the end With nothing but regret, At the beginning of the demise, The demise I crafted specifically for myself without even realizing what I had done, What I created: The beginning of the end.