Breath

Something I wrote last night over a couple of pints of ale, trying to capture a little of my journey from a really dark place towards a happier one. A road that I'm still walking.

Inhale, my room still smells stale with the smoke I created to blaze out my trail through the darkness and starkness;
Refusal to fail is what drove me to carry on breathing though seething with rage at the world as I exhaled,
I watched my skin turn pale
Through these red eyes, perversion, and white lies that soon died with my introversion
As I caught a glimpse of the blue skies,
And wrote my own version
Of a tale that had once told itself
In the words and the voices of somebody else,
Still a person but not me,
I can't articulate properly the depths of my shame and despair in that costly unbearable state;
I was lost and I couldn't see
Reason or hope or the leaves of the World Tree
That faded through amber to grey from their green as I smoked weed and stared at a screen,
As if joy would just find me
And loosen the tethers that gripped me so tightly in pain,
I remained as my teeth became stained;
My reflection would always stare back in disdain
At the man who surrendered his brilliant brain
To a substance that once seemed to help him sustain his existence,
Persistence is rarely in vain but I don't see a new me,
The best thing I can be
Is locked in my room, left alone to be angry.

Author's Note

I don't expect this to flow properly in written form as I envisioned it as something spoken aloud in my own style, so I apologise if it seems closer to the ramblings of a madman than a poem.