Dispatches from the Trenches of Despair

I howled out in pain,

Some time ago now,

Like some poor feral beast

Cruelly caught in a trap,

And several times since,

I howled out in pain

At the thought of the waste

Of the life that might once have been mine,

Of the appalling mess

I made of my most precious days,

And all the hurt I inflicted

On souls who once believed in me,

For all throughout the years,

I threw both fortune and love away,

Not once but repeatedly,

Time and time again,

I destroyed the very best

That life can gift a person with,

And with such an obscene facility,

I stand on the precipice

Of the final pathetic phase

Of a catastrophic existence,

Quite saturated with heartache,

And half insane with regret,

Yet, I never even sought the compensatory gifts

Of peace and domesticity,

The little ones that might have been,

They were all spirited away from me

By a monster in thrall

To some perverse pathology,

And yes, that monster was me,

I am the legacy of his aberrancy,

Still I strive on a diurnal basis

To make the best of the little that remains to me,

And if I can serve as a kind of warning,

I might yet know a measure of peace…