Ah Mea Culpa, This Culprit

So Christmas is coming and with that,
I hope,
so will Jacob Marley.
Or that maybe more appropriately
that I will no longer be Jacob Marley
and with that shed these chains.
But a beggar’s dreams.
Ah, yes, but some beggars dream.

Alas, I know that there shall be no
secular conversion to societal redemption
and although I was always taught to be a man
of forgiveness
and although I would like to think that I wear that title
better than most (facts are of course, always debatable)
I think that this time
it will be a namesake I shall not live up to.
So I sit in the back room
whistling a bit and moaning loathsome tirades
like that hollow ghost that can be so easily mistaken as hallowed.

Tonight
like most every night
I will sit huddled next to an open window
with my cigarette cherry throwing the only light
and I will look at my
torn, broken, worthless and worn out hands
and I will think back to what they have crafted from mere dust
and what they can craft
with mud and clay and fire and that I have none
and I will hang my head ashamed
as always.

These worthless hands.
This waste of breath.

And tonight,
as always,
I will dream before I sleep
of somewhere else.

Always somewhere else.
Sometimes someone else,
but there is no one else
because there is

no one at all

anyway.


As always.