Nineteen People

I don’t mean to boast, but sir, are you a ghost in your childhood home?
Is your mental decay quite as strong a display as, say, I’d have shown (even on my own)?
For the lengths to which I would return to elongate the people I’ve been
Must be proof of destruction enough, called your bluff, sir, I win

This whole thing is of my immaculate love conceived by a mood
Which in keeping with days and ignites the malaise to which I allude, is your pulchritude
And your light which will beckon me forth to a darkness much brighter than mine
I need look no further than your eyes, no surprise that i’m fine

But I feel ill-equipped, getting sick on the ship of my monologue
Then they ask of my year, and I see my career is thrown to the dogs, keep that catalogued
Fuse missed the spark, but I can’t disembark for I feel a remarkably longing desire to rot in a hole of my old design, at least that was mine

I’m coming to doubt that what I’ve lived without is of use to me
Yet I’m coming to scorn the illusions I'm born with as pleasantries, or just apathy
So I float between nothing and something, a flower of some train of thought
I’d bestow you the meaning of life, but that’s right I forgot

And further dismay comes with songs that I play that just give me pause
If the music is trite, is it worse than a life lived for shallow cause, or worse, scant applause?
The moon is so bitter I can’t not acquit her of crimes that will pitter and patter so previously, worlds are so small and still parenting what I'm meriting

I hope the year comes when my conscience becomes a naïveté
When the vows that we said and the big double bed are both far away, it’s the end of day
And you balk in your bedclothes and stare through your wrinkles with eyes of nineteen
I'll begrudgingly lay down the book and say, “darling, i’m clean"