I am not a religious man,
then they have forsaken me.
Left me to rot in this unending labyrinth,
to crawl on bloodied hands
through fires that never cleanse.
Each day I wake and wish I hadn’t.
Each breath feels borrowed,
a debt I never agreed to pay.
it is punishment, prolonged and cruel.
Yahweh, who answers in riddles of silence?
Christ, who bleeds beautifully,
but leaves my wounds to fester?
Allah, merciful in scripture
but merciless in the spaces where I live?
birth and death, creation and decay—
am I caught in your spinning
for your amusement or your indifference?
Buddha, you say life is suffering,
but what of when suffering becomes life entire,
when existence itself is the wound,
and enlightenment feels like mockery?
you traded your eye for wisdom—
tell me, what must I give for peace?
You hung upon Yggdrasil for truth—
must I hang too, just to learn why?
I must have angered you somehow—
for like Prometheus I am bound,
by the vultures of your silence.
Job cried and was tested,
What of me, who kneels with no reward?
Am I not devoted enough in my despair?
How much agony buys the favor of a god?
you weigh hearts against feathers—
what happens when the heart is ash?
but simply trembles beneath its own ruin?
And still the heavens do not answer.
rolling my grief uphill forever,
condemned to worship the weight that crushes me.
the ancestors, the forgotten gods—
Their silence is scripture now.
Their absence, a cruel devotion.
Yet still I find myself longing—
for a whisper that says I see you,
a hand that says I want you,
a soul that says you are not alone.
But even if such mercy came,
like a beast too long in the dark
blinded by the idea of light?
Because darkness raised me.
It is my cradle, my coffin, my inheritance.
Hope is a foreign tongue.
Happiness, the cruelest lie of all.
a man stripped bare of gods,
asking questions that echo into nothing,
prayers that collapse under their own weight,
and wondering if the only truth left is this:
but the darkness that consumed me.
