How to Murder Your Own Soul
A Manual for Vanishing
Listen! Do you hear it? The beating of your heart
grows fainter with each word you read.
This is how you fade from mortal sight,
how you slip between the folds of being.
Begin when the clock strikes thirteen
when time itself grows sick and turns upon its axis.
Stand naked before the blackest mirror
and watch your flesh melt from your bones
like wax before the funeral pyre.
Swallow your own name until it rots
within your belly, spawning maggots
that crawl up through your gullet
spilling from your lips in putrid verse.
You are becoming unbecome.
Seek the graveyard's hungriest soil,
where the worms grow fat on sorrow.
Let the earth taste your living feet
until you sink, sink, ever sinking
into the realm beneath all realms.
Feel your blood grow black as tar,
your veins become rivers of the damned.
Each heartbeat sends you deeper
into the abyss that yawns within your chest,
that chasm where your soul once dwelt.
Forget! Forget the faces of the living!
Let memory become a tomb
where love lies murdered by your hand,
where hope rots in its burial shroud.
Now! NOW! As madness takes its throne
within the palace of your skull,
as sanity flees screaming through the night,
you feel it, yes! The final severance!
You are the ghost of what you were,
the shadow cast by nothing,
the scream that has no voice!
About the Creator
Tim Carmichael
Tim is an Appalachian poet and cookbook author. He writes about rural life, family, and the places he grew up around. His poetry and essays have appeared in Bloodroot and Coal Dust, his latest book.
Keep reading
More stories from Tim Carmichael and writers in Poets and other communities.
Comments (3)
Dark, but very special! 💀🖤
It's a quite haunting thought that we are the ghosts of who we once were. Great work!
Phenomenal writing! Vivid & Riveting!