“Heart Rot” by Apathy Front

Distant and out of reach,
I exist here watching the sun rise and fall with time in suspense,
drifting into muse and being swallowed by the unknown,
using nothing but the illusion of senses to ground weak roots
I hide myself
through curtains of blue weeping wisteria blossoms,
for if you could look past them you would see the disease that decays my heartwood.

People carve memories of themselves into my bark, hacking into my trunk until I’ve fallen,
the sharp impact of an ax less agonizing than knowing I am taking up space to begin with.

I stand in the quiet stillness of my own conviction,
drawing caution tape around me to keep you at a safe distance,
praying you don’t cross it,
I preserve each flower that blooms in your company with the hopes of giving you a basket full in return.

The wind blows them away as brittle dead leaves;
useless to you, I hope they bury themselves into the earth to grow into flowers you do like,
wondering if it’s wrong of me to want to give you all of my leaves anyway, knowing you’ve been raking the ground.

There are moments of flushed pleasant coincidence where you’ll share a remnant of yourself, and I’ll capture the serendipity of your presence in tender reverie,
bashfully hanging each picture on the end of a branch with a clothespin until the termites have eaten me.
Gazing upon the splatters of soft color that paint the ground underneath you,
I lose myself to self-indulgence, blushed with sickly affection and adoration.

The canvas is covered, regardless I wouldn’t have to look at it to know you are beautiful,
but rose-colored glasses will eventually turn lavender, clouding a sunny day with gentle drizzle,
internal strife blurring where desires and needs become indistinguishable,
longing twists into aching before pangs of hunger begin to gnaw at me,
withering from a craving comparable to the torment of starvation,
I blindly reach out to grasp for control, once again falling victim to natural impulse and addiction,
digging myself so far in my own demise I’m already sitting in my own burial plot wasting away,
becoming the illness that once plagued me, a grotesque culmination of sin tainting everything I touch,
worms wriggle through rancid cavities in my decomposed body, leaving me to mourn a death I’ve missed,
even without mushrooms clinging themselves onto my shoulders, my trunk would still be hollow with grief,
a deteriorating corpse memorializing despair,
funerals are for the living, but I desperately crave for someone to remember me.

Not even the arborist could cure the flaws that go deeper than ailments,
so instead I choose to disintegrate into the soil, suffocating the last pocket of air with handfuls of earth,
hollow chasms filling with wholeness–
the contentment of release.