Sixx Feet Below

How can one build a life on broken bone,

On splintered years that never felt like home?
How can one greet the light of day
When youth was torn and thrown away?

No tears remain to cleanse this face,
No gentle word, no warm embrace.
The mirror shows what time won’t hide,
A wounded child still locked inside.

A sickness roots within my head,
It feeds on all that went unsaid.
It tightens slow around my will,
A quiet force that hungers still.

My first remembered prayer was dread,
The hand that formed me wished me dead.
With bottle gripped in iron hand,
He ruled a dark and ruined land.

My mother moved like fading breath,
Her silence thick with living death.
We learned to speak in lowered tone,
In rooms where mercy was unknown.

No angel came, no heaven cried,
No god stood watch, no light replied.
Just sickness blooming day by day,
And pieces of me stripped away.

Darkness seems a harbor, pale and still,
While life is chase o’er barren hill.
I hunt a star that was never mine,
A distant, cold, unyielding sign.

Death murmurs low and draws me near,
More kind than hope, more soft than fear.
While life pursues in endless chase,
And leaves me breathless in its race.

It whispers in the dead of night:
“Let the earth close cold and hide all light.
No past remains, no memory to show,
Only darkness, sixx feet below.”