They’re Playing Kaufman at the Theater

Behind the camera’s eye I’m

writhing in this capsule I’ve twisted shut and

trying to sprout by hanging on the memory on the edge of your lips,

pretending a lingering taste means more than waste

and not just the bitter candy written off as remedy.

---

The sourness is a familiar legacy that

splashes over rays of sunshine, but

never pierces past a barrier of clouds,

reverberating off of the raining troubles while I’m already a foot under,

breathing in water for air,

drinking up defeat to weigh my bones down to sea.

---

Reflecting off the tomb of this pool I see

locks of hair arranged for a movie scene,

illuminated by that star I appointed to you

that you never really earned.

In depths below, twenty-three fathoms or so,

the warmth of this image survives any effort to replace.

I call it comfort but end up waking up shivering

in the cold knowledge of your touch

and the lies inside of your fingernails.

---

Called again

the room inside my head

where I know

you are wide awake.

---

Mine the mascara dry and I

am unsteady on hands and knees when

I mistook happiness in a counterattack over the counter,

whispering convincing untruths to bluff sadness,

and hope the scars don’t shine on film.

---

Tally marks remain lined up

to be the sentries that are

circling the thought of you,

their razor fangs barred to preserve a rotted fruit.

Teething on a numbed joint and

I swear it looks like rays of sunshine

pouring from the torpedo hole launched into the boat’s belly.

---

Gave Carey a thought and drew concept,

but came away empty when

reality and fiction ceased to blur in the family photo.

There’s still a clementine rooted in the pit of my stomach,

leaking a sourness into my senses.

I call it comfort but always rise while shuddering,

having felt the electric charge of your touch

and the lies inside of your mouth.

---

Called again

the room inside my head

where I know

you are wide awake.

---

Stuck again

dwelling next to your bed

where I know

I can never leave.

---

Try or fail

I am always drifting

straight into those rays of sunshine.

---

Snagged in the tendrils spread out from the image

as what I am and what I claim to be never intersect,

lost in translation in antipathetic arms.

I’ll turn to stone in your portrayal of my self-worth,

having never been good enough,

and now never good enough for myself.

---

Watching the waves wash in and out of the room inside my head,

hoping for a high watermark to take it away.

In any ending, I’m always up at night,

shivering.

( ❤ Mitch)

The Worst Great Mind, Finale

You said

to be someone;

to be who I had always been,

though tucked behind an actor’s skin.

---

You said

to be honest

to the friends that never leapt;

those that held fast in firing lines.

---

How quickly it all was sacrificed when playing the role of God,

twisting the hands of time to combat conspiracy.

I was a fool then.

I’ve the same foolish head now,

but lately it’s found a center,

buoyed to one last reality that halts wayward destiny.

These trajectories now meet.

---

Call it science or call it fate.

Call it whatever needed to create

our hands holding close in a window’s dull glow.

---

Call it genius or insanity or calculated,

call it whatever needed to create

our lips brushing lightly in the reversal of memory.

---

Enraptured by a second condemned to expiration,

left fully formed in the depths of a conscious traveler,

I wonder if these constructs of the hippocampus are but hollow rooms,

the scenery drenched in grays illuminated by a mind’s touch,

but they’re never to be shared by the others who were there.

---

Brushing lightly in the present,

all but simple acquaintances,

half aware and half unaware.

I wonder if you’ll ever know.

I hope you’ll someday know.

I do not own this image

( ❤ Mitch)

Thanks for reading! I know this was a long one, but I had fun revisiting one of my favorite shows of all time 🙂

The Worst Great Mind, pt. 5

To correct it all;

to steal away the pen of history,

the coup of the author would be worth flawed flesh.

Imagery of tyranny leaves no impact.

An objective flies directly from a heart to the bearer of its chain

to which I am devoted to bet the last of all energy.

Let wills dissolve into laser’s precision.

---

Enough remains for two chances at salvation:

The excavation of normalcy turned fantasy when buried under impulses.

Tragedy nips at the heels; ignore it.

Mistakes are computed to an ultimate act of loss; move past it.

Of a million routes carved into history,

one deserves the barrage brewing inside me:

The lasting act of a character on stage.

---

A fratricide blinds the eyes of the fortunately ignorant,

made a feature drama as a man’s scorn drills a hole into a daughter.

Encased in shock with limbs halting in motion,

a mad scientist must come to action.

Immaculate improvisation.

---

Fates and forces out of mankind’s deft hand are ever so elusive.

The leader of the gate,

the seer of diverging matrixes;

he is the one to hold the key to any reality.

---

The irony forever dawns in the unrelenting knowledge of effects,

where the movement of the savior caused the ripples he now adjusts.

It would have to be the worst of all great minds to err so,

though never faltering as foes arched arrows into the castle.

The leader of the gate paves the way.

---

Destiny’s eyes can be tricked by theatrics.

The final cost comes in blood and I’ve it all to spare.

I’ll submerge beneath a rising haven.

None more will see or know the name that allowed it to soar.

Seeing life erupt in eyes once prophesized as closed,

I’ll submerge beneath my masterwork.

Distant regimes topple into forgotten chronology,

but the magnum opus is you and I.

---

I need no praise beyond this point of ascension through descension.

I’ve found a purpose in bleeding out.

To live or to falter at the gate,

I no longer feel a need to pretend.

I know now who I always was.

I am he who holds the key:

The leader of the gate.

I do not own this image

FINALE:

( ❤ Mitch)

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.

I do not own this image

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.

I do not own this image

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.

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.

I do not own this image

PART 2:

( ❤ Mitch)

The Living Shield, Finale

Read Part 3 Here:

Challenged in power twice now,

the act of losing,

foreign to the conquest I oversaw,

hastens its pace,

with a breathing tsunami approaching,

and I, stranded, bearing its weight.

---

Encountering pain far from past pleasure,

I find scars where armor had been laid,

now the gaping maw of a waterfall’s barrage.

The soul I’ve uncovered begins to decay.

---

Encountering a force so driven against,

I feel limbs abandon their outposts in favor of ache,

the spectacle of an erupting forest depleting.

The soul I’ve uncovered begins to decay.

---

With shadows beckoning my arrival to obscurity

where questions evade the answers of morals,

I wonder if this was engineered in predetermination;

If the sights I have seen and the emotion within

were the flaws in the blood I had once drank from,

and the fall I now face is the conclusion I’ve forever known

for being human in the womb of an insect.

---

I wonder if this is the mistake that drives this killing blow

and if this is the mistake that permits me to embrace it,

watching without pain now as flesh collapses inward.

---

I know now the love you found.

I find at the brink of uncertainty the heart I never acknowledged.

---

Can it be…

can it be possible

as I embrace this killing blow,

You can survive to tell it all?

You can endure where I could not

And no man can steal away your domain.

---

I know it all now.

I’m thankful it could be me

to be your ultimate defense

and take this spear’s strike.

I’m thankful to have lived.

( ❤ Mitch)

The Living Shield, pt. 3

Read Part 2 Here:

A corpse limps from the caverns of the room.

The cold by my side lingers.

His expression is an obscured slate,

no face visible beyond a wayward morality.

---

Crawling down the back of my neck and toying with my nerves,

a quiet voice enters the space,

offering a plain request:

Fix a foe who has passed into an unknown.

Defy the mechanics of death itself when exposed to an unprepared mind.

I can care not, for I have no power.

---

Save a life that has flickered out of time and into memory,

torturing a spirit too young to comprehend.

I can care not, for I know not the way.

---

Seeping silently out of a growing agony,

a storm begins its invasion of innocence.

Wind races about,

bounding off of the tiles,

the gusts of a mounting anger forming an immovable object

stained with the recollection of trauma on repeat,

the tragedy that makes a boy a soldier,

and a soldier into a hollowed bearer of a scythe

swinging wild at anything that crosses its path.

---

Here is where the crosshair comes to focus.

Through the hole it makes in my chest,

I see a sniper’s aim straight to my allegiance.

True or not, it is no difference;

The risk is emanating from a towering boy

turned killer by circumstance.

---

Let it find its match in this room.

I am the palace walls that have yet to fall.

I am the barrier that sustains the life behind.

I am the one with a purpose to find,

a promise to keep,

a word to abide by.

---

Use everything that you care to use.

Your ambition will land on the shield I create.

As a hurricane finds purchase in unbridled ire,

routes are shuttered at their escapes.

Found in the range of a reaper’s ceaseless lust,

what’s left to consider is to hold fast in the soil

and fight for the secret all too transparent.

I do not own this image

( ❤ Mitch)

Read the Finale Here:

The Living Shield, pt. 2

Read Part 1 Here:

Colder than a whisper of Hell,

a presence emerges from the gates.

No more than a child yet with a devil’s might

and a devil’s care for collateral damage,

with a crosshair unwavering from my chest

and the last objective I’ve to fulfill.

---

History screams in a voice barren of negotiation

as the innocent are pulled from the sidelines into the firing squad.

No more can be given.

I’ve become a husk for the sake of another

at the direction of a beloved.

No more can be given but a plea and a promise.

---

Never is there to be harm upon the casualty of our collision.

If there is blame to be had in the name of the past,

take this ruptured arm for the trophy of your rage

and step away from the secret.

---

Doubt has been made alien to me at the threat of defeat.

My conviction is singular and your intent is a flying spear.

Away from these walls, you may guide me away,

but it is never to be if a stray scratch adorns this frame I tend to.

An errant action will be off with your head.

I’ll swear this upon the second promise I can make:

Guide me away, but spare the spare,

whose only fault was to be stuck in our middle.

---

Lay not a finger.

I swear on this:

Upon her first breath I will meet your history

and the score shall settle itself in due course.

Nestled in the nadirs of a concealed arena,

this can all be brought to its end.

---

At your demand I am forced to abide,

seeing her body flinch as it awakens to the world,

seeing the finality that rests in a devil’s immobile stance.

---

Should you find a way through me, I now come to fear:

What of the king miles away?

Drowned in the bleak battle that’s assured by your power,

that which I care for most now finds itself out of balance

and I feel duty awaken anew inside.

I do not own this image

( ❤ Mitch)

Read Part 3 Here: