SWAMPED WITH REMORSE AND REGRET.

(no comment needed)

To fail spectacularly

Is to invite the catalog of personal failures

To mirror what’s broken in you

In little aching steps

Each failure

A step in the course and chorus comprising the full chirping catastrophe

Of your yawning self

Spiraling headlong

Regretfully, remorsefully,

Stinging

Into the pool of couldas and shouldas and wouldas

Marquez’s poison nostalgia

No rudder can touch the bottom

Without driving your boat

To capsize

Again

And again.

An inventory from error

You’d invent time travel to resolve

Each in their turn

Rather than suffer again and again

Knowing this:

That you were the author of sufferings greater than merely your own now

That in your adolescent shortsightedness

You’d broken the hearts of too many beautiful people

You were too young

Too broken

To know how to love right

To know how to love

In the fullness of love.

And so you drown in the echoes of that loss

Today

And wonder how you ended up so rudderless yourself

As you stood before the scales of your judgment

Your feather so much lighter than your heart?

Anubis licks his lips.

Reason tells you to be tender

You could’ve have lived and loved and laughed

Any other way.

Justice tells you that is plainly wrong.

Justice tells you

You trampled love, blind

You lived blind to reason and balance

And you laughed at all the wrong jokes

While deaf to the ones most deserving of your shared joy.

Echoes. Echoes. Echoes.

I pull from the rigging

The oar hit me in the head

Bubbles pass from lips

Grimy, green, soupy swamp water

Swirling in

Anubis licks his lips.

I can’t get away from failure.

It haunts me everywhere I go.

The people I loved

Until recently

Always paid the highest toll.

Now. Now. Now.

Now, the toll man comes for me

The scales tipped

The old god licks his lips

Under lamp light

The debt on the ledger

Is in pounds

Of my flesh.