January 2021 – Page 2 – The Works of Mitch Worden

The Worst Great Mind, pt. 4

Blood runs on these hands.

Blood dries on these imperfect hands.

Blood stains this shadow of a man forced to pretend.

Contrite laughs by a grave revelation

have bound a soul to disguise himself out of desperation.

I am the character on stage armed with theatrics,

allowing white coats to cloak a thinning veneer.

A glass construct shudders at its base.

Piece it together with your arms as a fortress.

Struggling in a cityscape unphased by its lurking trauma,

piece me together as my machinery decomposes.

My constant companion, unaware as you are,

carrying the weight of a collapsing structure,

instilling confidence forgotten in the next travel backwards,

yet never absent from my mind,

cursed to remember every scene of every outcome.

Caressing now amidst a concluding drama,

is it fair now to say we’ve won?

Observing the repercussions of undoing foolish consequences,

desire flatlines in favor of a once undesirable status quo,

where a microwave meant nothing more than the sum of its parts.

The cords have been untangled.

A smile regains its shape.

But a snag—

a gear caught in transition—

a jarring realization—

innocence flickers out of focus,

a glitch in convoluted reality.

An explosion seemingly years past resonates in the now.

The now is nowhere near safe.

A line is caught on an error of existence;

a flaw of life when its destination had been decided—

a glitch in convoluted reality.

Of all futures,

one is a victory only Pyrrhus would accept.

One is certain defeat;

the utter destruction of me in every outcome.

The now is nowhere near safe.

Makise Kurisu must die.

PART 5:

( ❤ Mitch)

The Worst Great Mind, pt. 3

Immaculate are the schematics,

but failure stalks among the details.

Measure the second hand,

mark the precise point of departure.

The lesson is nullified upon the winding of time.

Adding selfishness to subtract the joy of others,

I cannot trust even the neighbor selling lies on the bottom floor.

Operating only on the diminishing flame of insanity

as a tunnel narrows,

the light succumbing to a constricted hope.

Wave goodbye to a doomed voyage.

Accept the resignation of falling short.

Every impact leaves an irreparable dent on this sinking frame.

Sucking dry the flower of optimism bred in by foolish dreams,

it cannot be the fault of yours.

What I would do to hold and console,

allow reserves to crumble into the ash of burnt imagination,

yet trapped in the hell of purgatory may I always be found.

In each relapse to destiny’s prologue,

a flash of red hair sneaks into my eye.

In pieces scattered across fluctuating worlds,

she remains ignorant of how she reconstructs my puzzle.

Reassurance is forgotten in the blink of a condemned endeavor.

She always returns to draw color into blanks.

In every action there have been reasons to abandon,

and through experience I cannot comprehend why anyone would save me.

I only know that a second chain is growing in my depths.

In shadows of self-imposed dilemmas,

crawling from exit to entrance;

a loop straight to a runaway escape,

she always returns,

and I find new strength.

PART 4:

(<3 Mitch)

The Worst Great Mind, pt. 2

Continuously extinguished.

I watch anguished at unshakable fate.

Shackled to the will of time,

she slips into the cracks between conflicting lines.

No greater force exists that I would never bear,

but attempts are fruitless versus the paradox I created.

Worried are all that see a slow descent towards surrender.

They cannot know the danger faced.

They can never see.

A sight once so clear is mired in future deaths.

The butterfly’s wings have been rendered to shreds,

peeled off surgically to fulfill human impulses.

Must I reverse all and erase what brought growth?

Have I come to hold the hammer that strikes down all creation?

Ushering a father to his grave,

a child back to their isolation,

a rebel into endless woe;

is this the cost that must be paid?

To drag a weary soul back to its brink where emptiness awaits;

is this the cost that must be paid to see your smile?

To feel the warmth residing in the room

that marches valiantly in a life built of lies and posturing,

I’d slice off every limb if only to hear your laugh.

Brilliance is the haven out of reach.

Painfully aware now how far below I am.

If drifting into rifts cut into reality’s fabric,

a single chain linked to the center ensnares a wavering heart.

I would pay the cost to return to that realm.

I will pay the cost to know happiness again.

Madness be damned.

Precious Mayuri and Okabe : steinsgate — I do not own this image

PART 3:

(<3 Mitch)

The Worst Great Mind, pt. 1

Call it happenstance.

Call it determination.

Call it destiny preordained.

I am stood here all the same.

Call it genius.

Call it insanity.

Call it calculated.

I measure to the same failure.

Is it per my hand

or per my will

or per the pain of others

that I am henceforth pushed forward?

Driven by desire

and driven back by the selfsame urges

as reality itself bends.

I was familiar

and am now made alien,

venturing to known lands rendered unknown,

and the fault requires ownership.

At the head of a vessel

now spiraled out of control,

who am I to say I am not the one at blame?

Smothered by the demise of dreams

and the strangling of security

brought to fathoms below in a muzzle’s flash

or sliced in the aftermath of a car crash,

I alone bear witness.

I alone possess the guilt.

I alone am stranded between a creeping future of wrongs

and a reality I avoided.

Steins;Gate Ep. 13: Fate | Moe Sucks — I do not own this image

PART 2:

( ❤ Mitch)

The Product Nears its Expiration Date

What do you think you’re doing crawling out of your box?

We tucked you in so nice and neat,

cutting pinprick holes into this carboard shell just so you’d barely breathe.

Through each gap there’s space enough to cram through enough to satisfy.

Chug down the dose, the hope, the realizations, and call it even on the day.

Categorized, stereotyped,

we’ve drilled a label into your abdomen.

Ostracized, paralyzed,

accept the placement provided.

Do you want to be mad?

Who do you think deserves a wayward pointing blame?

Do you want to be mad?

Who’s the target?

Slash out when a sad man approaches and scratches sprout from your knee.

Analyzed and monitored and pushed out with an assurance and guaranteed debt.

It all seems as though the puzzle was figured out.

This is where you’re meant to follow along.

Do kindly fold your hands together in the face of diagnosis.

So you want to be alone?

You said you couldn’t bear the thought.

So you want to be alone?

How about you stay alone?

And we stand back to watch you toil as you twist away in a cage,

built for you and made with material you provided.

Context is the content of the gray matter that’s been mined empty.

Scream at a blank screen that isn’t answering back.

Worry not, all else have been informed your number’s next in line.

A single drop of blood is a postcard to Hades announcing a ticket purchase.

Maybe you should crawl back to where you came from,

back to where it’s safe.

There was a real world looking in when you were busy looking out

Maybe you should scramble into where your bed has been made.

We wrote the script for you.

Do you want to be mad now that you’ve got what you wanted?

A little floodlight can hover over the tomb at night.

That small hope must keep burning bright.

You’ll be dragged to the end without a sound.

Until then you’ll spend until you dry.

( ❤ Mitch)

Touring Our Future Tragedies

On the edges of the sidewalk she’s spiraling,

sending a numbed mind pirouetting down the boardwalk,

bouncing from every open door like a pinball without a course,

sinking into any empty bar stool that beckons her over.

I’m tethered to where fear tells me not to go.

With dragged footsteps I’m thrust around every dark corner.

We fall and stumble and march and step forth but we aren’t falling deeper together.

To the balcony she’s caught swaying,

saying she’s spotted the Golden Gate bridge and the waving water

lapping up against her ankles as if Atlantis called from beneath,

promising respite for a weary traveler.

Faulty heartwork machinery prints desire out for the mind to follow.

I bear the same cannonball she cradles to her chest.

We trip and tumble and forge on and forward but we aren’t coming closer together.

In the shaded bedroom haunts she’s hiding,

claiming discovery of personality in manufactured throes,

driving up and down streets that forgot her name,

visiting faces that forgot their duty to not turn about,

calling Atlas names for holding the world up when he should have let it drop,

and she could’ve taken a swan dive off to a finality frontier.

But she exists in still frames of a head on a shoulder blade,

propping her dancing body upright as she sails around the tables.

I promised myself to never blink in the case I’d lose a single illustration of happiness.

But she only exists in still frames of a head on a shoulder blade,

and I’m trying to chase Jesus down a bottle of pills.

Stare off into the azure abyss and it sits silent and still as a blanket,

as unassuming as a force could be.

“Dive into Atlantis to find me.”

A selfish part of me clung to the cables like a dying leaf grasping its tree branch.

We fell and stumbled and marched to our beat but we didn’t fall deeper together.

( ❤ Mitch)

Tumble Down the Highway

Sleepless at morn, shadows under eyes,

stumbling from the foot of the bed to the pantry pill box.

Hazy with thoughts gnawing like gnats

orbiting about, catching momentum from incessant worries.

Drunk now from the sense of dullness

reaching from the blank page and injecting its will.

And the happy faces around will always speak the same repeated lines:

“The peak is in the background.

The golden days are graying out.”

And they’re always around the cul-de-sac of ethereal realms,

waiting to play as if the hours were rendered motionless.

I could be out in that memory’s sun and bask in the fading light.

The cracks of winter would be shed in the decaying glow.

Instead I sit up, a pitch-black sky,

monitoring the minutes passing by as rest evades grasp.

Hazy with thoughts gnawing like gnats

that gang about the ugly sphere of unyielding insecurity.

Curled up now, back arching down,

scrambling for a crevice to bury into and feel a permanence of warmth.

The visions bleed into ash if I’m careless and blink too fast.

Mist clouds the irises.

The ink washes off the script.

Phrases gush over the edge of the table and outline a pit in the floorboards.

I could sink into it and find the nothingness of a plotless conclusion.

But there’s a wave in the distance from a passing crowd,

laughing and calling from a rusted street sign.

Holding out a hope now on a chopped tree limb; no one is looking back.

Holding out a far hope to snag another’s hand; the chill of seasons rejects.

I know a name or two but I fear I’m losing it in the mist.

I want to keep one or two of you but I can’t see through the mist.

Sleepless again, shadows grow long,

tracing an empty frame since abandoned by its host soul.

Hazy with thoughts gnawing like gnats,

and with quiet resignation I let them crawl into my mouth.

( ❤ Mitch)

Sisyphus Cringed

This place reeks of the smell of passing nights

and the stray stains of mistakes that sprout ghosts from the carpet.

The roots stack high to the ceiling.

Scale the vine and at the top there’s the same giant to find.

Floating back down to a coffin made out of bedsheets,

only to bounce straight back to the stratosphere of fear once eyelids shut.

She’s got her hand reaching out whenever the cold air is near,

prying each ear open to bottle up the same words inside.

I built a glass house of pill bottles and razor blades.

Glued it down top to bottom with currency.

A stray rock towards balcony’s perch and imaginary Maginot crumbles to dust.

The smell remains festering in the cracks.

It’s entrenched in the empty prescription crevices hungering for a weed to grow.

This place reeks of the smell of passing nights

and the promises screamed at a frail, broken frame,

wondering how limbs diminished to sinew.

At the peak of the white walls there are only more corridors;

a prison complex dressed up in memory as if it held certain truth.

The labor of slicing nascent dread from the climbers dulls steel and costs pounds.

Sisyphus took gauge of the scene and cringed at the fray,

for the veracity of mythology merged with misguided steps of history

bear common eyesight of circadian faults.

In the well of every hope is the knowledge that she’ll be reaching back,

and if there’s an interlude in the charade, the brutal touch will be craved.

It takes the pushing and shoving of plates to brew temper into action,

and nights have since passed where motion regressed to an unknown nothing.

The crust has sunk into a ball of gases that speaks in individual tones,

said “Adam was a cheater and Eve was a liar,

take solace to the grave for happily ever whenever.”

It’s staged in the drama of peeling walls.

It’s tattooed across the miles of dead skin.

I can smell it as the moon bows for the morning,

and it sits in its place be my sight conscious or wandering.

So I’ll cheat by the pills and pay their tolls,

singing songs over the telephone line that the medication is working fine.

Right at the time the giant is reaching down I’ll laugh in its face.

Her power is nil, my power is hers,

and beckoned on command I fall flat into cold air.

This places reeks of the smell of passing nights.

And the stray stains of mistakes that sprout ghosts from the carpet.

Higher and higher and higher they climb.

( ❤ Mitch)

You Have Died of Dysentery

Carry the heart away, so said history.

The whispers of wagon wheels professed the value of endless forward motion.

Off west with you to move the floorboards.

Plant stakes in a different guise.

Shake hands with brand new faces.

Each gesture mechanical; a surgical maneuver

to push out the older thoughts.

Dwell somewhere else and dwell no longer.

Dig away at the river bank, so said desperation.

Gilded dreams of faded footprints made a fantasy for a pointless fool.

The result never equals the fable.

Peel away the wooden planks.

Toss a dart on a compass with fingers crossed.

Lay down soil next to new faces

to forget the close, old figures.

Dwell somewhere else and dwell no longer.

Grind away against time, so said ancestry.

Teachings of prior days grounded in uncertain survival bred a cyclical psychology.

Mind never passes through atrium.

Rot is the only constant.

Cut away at memory’s fabric.

Lay out fresh architecture

to block out the old residents.

Dwell somewhere else and dwell no longer.

Fall to sleep across an atlas but topography remains sharp as ever.

Tie yarn around the pins, trace crisscross patterns on state lines.

The pen marks spell out history.

Off east to shift the floorboards over the borders,

treading over the drawings traveled over all the other times

trying to avoid the old haunts.

Repeat every somewhere and dwell ever longer.

Find a new line where the old line already was.

( ❤ Mitch)

Spitting Venom Through a Revolving Door

Steady sits the firing squad.

Limbs rest primed for motion.

An array of trigger fingered opportunists.

An itching desire craving a name to stand and aim for.

Send the shackled judged down the factory line,

churning out excuses to wave away porcelain cracks.

There’s always a chance the seams may break.

There’s a chance the wandering eye may catch a weakness in the design.

Let scissor blades cut picture frames.

Fold corners over the wrong parts.

Tear paper into the perfect words.

Make flawless out of flaws.

Play camouflage with origami

and pray the lying world will stay tucked inside.

Dressed up puppet master when working at the strings,

yet bleeding softly through irises when no other gaze can see.

Commanding pawns from the crack of the dawn.

Leaking precious misdirection to satisfy the hypocrite’s diet.

Blink once shifting pieces and the guns are reversed.

Pursuing prey to pronounce the blame on the targets.

Hastily taping over holes in parchment that emerge in vulnerability.

Blink once shifting pieces and the guns are reversed.

Hear the call from the choir: Liar.

Here comes the call from the choir: Liar.

The prize is yours to keep as only backs are visible now.

News travels fast if there’s a trace of blood to gnaw at.

Shot across the bow and out come the paper scars.

Shot down by your own gun who took you for a target.

Unchained watch idly by.

You burned down every bridge you could’ve run down.

Ready, at attention, accept the newfound burden.

No contours to disguise the deceiver exposed.

That which acts with abandon always swings back in time.