'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman

Fits of virulent apptitude like painted shadows grace the walls. My very own portraits of pretenses, possibilities, panderings, so much wasted time spent quivering and weeping and wailing to let myself escape these sacred rooms. Butterflies float on a passing zephyr, yet the shadows stay the same: unchangeable as Father Time himself. And if it was all leaked away into the great beyond? The great beyond, the original oxymoron. It would just be another statistic, like me, like you, like the man on the street, choking on his cigarettes and committing a slow suicide. Numbers leak the romance out of the world. Poets have been slaughtered by maruading bands of digits, shouting facts and equations into the sky, executing criminals with a swift product and summation. Or would that be quotient and difference?

My hands are broken artifacts, just so much unused clay rotting in the corner. I barely care. Barely. Butterflies, romance, empty stories to convince myself to not let go just yet, maybe tomorrow will have something good. Something excellent, something positively to die for. I know what death is. My soul shies away from the truth, but I still want it. Should I bring it closer with one stroke? One stroke or two, like that cartoon. Me, I howl into the empty rooms I haunt, already aware that there will be only my echo to answer my anguish.

I am running out of time. Time is so precious, Father, so beautiful, like liquid, and the older I get, the more it falls from my grasp, trailing through my fingers as months flow by the same way seconds used to when I was a child. What a childish fancy, making time seem to be something other than what it is. And what is it, Father? My footsteps in the sand, a trail leading behind me into the fog, the flesh eating fog, and I can't help myself. I try to stop walking, I try to ease the burdens I have strung to my back. Father, why did you leave me with hands so small that time could only run faster and faster away into the ocean instead of pooling at my feet? But no one listens, and the walls close in again.

No one ever listens.

I can feel the crystal goblets shattering on the floor. My feet bleed as I walk over them. I must destroy these sacred rooms. I must, for the pounding in my head is at it's worst and the walls are still golden...

Father, have you repented?

Bullshit.

Fancy words and stories won't fucking save you, little girl. Fancy words and stories will send you to hell. Hell and heaven and earth and fire. Wind and air and mercy and desire. Is desire just as cold as ice? Lust isn't hot, it's freezing, and the golden walls are silver with frost. This must be lust.

Blatant denial, Father. I am your little angel, a little angel with broken wings who lifts her hands to ward off

FUCKING EVERYTHING

I wish you'd just hit me instead. Good fathers know how to make their little girls dead. I'm trapped by your lies and my fear and it's sweet, knowing you don't even care. I'll never tell you and you don't know.

Guess that's the way it snows in hell. I know that these sacred rooms keep me safe from you.

Goodnight, Father

I'm the Monster Tonight