Walled Garden / Rope Burns

There’s a fountain there It never rains and it never fills Sometimes children come to fill their pockets With coins Not old enough to know how hope turns to weeds Or how many fortunes have been lost In the name of fortune Empty their minds They wait in silence The pitted concrete basin Cloven and overgrown Plays host to outcast dreamers Of futures lost In shackles clamoring for One grasp at solitude They share these broken dreams and Dead promises Force-fed a constant stream of misplaced hopes and burned-out aspirations Transformed into the grist for the mill Of the bloated, of the gluttons Of their wretched, contorted, conniving deceit Leeched dry of their souls to prolong the feast For they must feed One solitary cry A million kingdoms die Strike them down Light them up Make them suffer Penance Strike them down Light them up Make them bleed Strike them down Light them up Make them suffer Make them bleed Fire in the garden Terror in the halls They cower behind Their gilded walls Burn down their houses Drag them screaming into the streets Pour their blood into the fountain Drench the coins in their defeat The pitted concrete basin Remains so empty still The death mage reign is endless Dreams unfulfilled In shackles clamoring for Anything but self-deceit Any attempts are hopeless The worms sustain their greed

When seconds are years And breaths take countless days What chance is there to hold on? To hold fast to hope Persevere through the darkness Cherish a glimmer of the self Reach for solace Stretch out your eager hands Strain for the surface Embrace the dirt under your nails Each breath a battle Grit your teeth until they’re ground into dust The skin sloughs from my palms Blood staining the braided fibers Fragments embedded deep Within the festering wounds As I decay What life is this? Bleeding out while looking in Falling back to where I started My broken back Saps my determination So much easier to collapse I can’t go on feeling like this I just slide back down to my faults I can’t go on feeling like this I just slide back down The skin sloughs from my palms Blood staining the braided fibers Fragments embedded deep Within the festering wounds Bite my tongue Gouge my eyes Shred my skin Flay my heart Can’t lie here With palms bleeding out One choice now Take hold of the rope