So I'm The Axe Murderer You Married

Nobody knows this but me. And even after I tell you, there will still be some who do not know.

I hesitated.

In the fatal moment when my wife slipped in the road before that oncoming truck ran her over, I hesitated. Had I not, she'd be alive. But I hesitated.

It was an instant of revelation. A chance to be free. In the heat of the moment, my true passions gave way. I was hating the relationship and wanted out without saying so. I'd been forcing it down my throat. A voice yelled, "Stop!"

It's on a perpetual loop in my mind. It was a deliberate act on my part. The consolations that surrounded me afterward left me acting a part. That is hell. I will be in that hell rest of my days.

Worst thing that can happen to a liar is success. I'm doomed and trapped in a forgotten hole, no amount of attention is enough. I cry for help in my everyday conversation but no one notices. Please, get me out. Guilt and fear are melting my mind.

So I write this to no one in sheer desperation. Too afraid to say it in real life. That I was so lonely I'd take a bad relationship over no relationship. A loser who needed to appear a winner. Why did that damn moment have to come along! Did I wish it into happening? Jesus, I can't get that thought out of my head.

At night, broken fragments of my acted day come back to haunt me. Don't forget to lie! Don't slip up and let loose you're not sorry she's gone! One perceptive soul "joked" about me being glad I couldn't have done more because then I'd still be stuck with my wife. I could swear there was a menacing twinkle in her eye that put the fear of God into me. It was the last exciting flicker of hope I have known.

It is true, after all. Everything comes out in the wash and we're each destined to come clean. But coming clean exposes me as dirty. I'm isolated, drowning at the bottom of the ocean with the cement weight of this secret hanging around my neck. Maybe that's why the mafia kills people that way, their secrets are killing them and they express that when they kill. Losers all, we liars.

I'm sure there's more I haven't faced. Bottom line is it was a dishonest relationship. I let that fester until it finally boiled over in The Moment. Dear God, what I've done cannot be undone. Looking back, I see anger had taken over my heart. Angry at the dishonesty, angry at the thought my only out was to go back to my life of anguished and tortured loneliness. I was just going to ride out the BS until I died, I figured. I figured wrong.

Like the President, I now love those who hate me. I seek out those who cheer my demise. No, they don't know specifically about The Moment, but they do applaud my insecurity and increasing pettiness. Some are kindred killers, seething in their cages. Others are like I was before The Moment: living a lie they vainly hope will have no consequence. We all share a common hell of Quixotic fights against imagined enemies whom we've deemed superior by virtue of not being us.

"No one else could have been as stupid and pathetic as I've been."

I guess they have their specific reasons too for staying in the dark, refusing the gift of light, forsaking any future. It's unbearable when I see winners live intelligent and free in the light. The murderous impulse lives in me still, having happened once I cannot escape it here in the dark. We are the world. We are the trolls. We don't see how our love can ever be good enough.

Dead Soul Dollars Rotting

I'm sitting in my recliner of eased leather, eyes half shut, I think the TV is sputtering in the darkness, inside the perfect cage of my upper class home in my upper class neighborhood far from the madding crowd, the world safely filtered to the narrowest of my tunnel vision; untouchable; flames surround me but I feel no peasant's heat...

If they could see my face now: frowning in bitterest rage, disavowing the universe; volcanic rumblings simmer within, unstoppable when the time comes; what sort of beast is so unbecoming; I feel large chunks of me solidifying into hard blocks unable to move, dangerous; I rot by the seconds, a downhill slow motion slide into the cesspool where no one lives clean...

I know why the TV shooting people kill: they can't fund their rot; I'd explode too if they stuck me stranded in the middle of that shit despised as the real world, who can suffer that bleeding long, not sure how far I'd go to protect my holy perch of insulated isolation; if someone made me justify my position...

Worship the dead dollar and call it God, that's the way of the world with its currency of righteous death, suited pigs strutting among toiling masses who beg for enslavement so they'll always have someone to blame, from top to bottom bound by chains of anger at This Thing Of Ours, insisting without believing there's no other way...

Of nothing that I see can I speak, this mist must remain solely in my mind, the lies cutting me in screaming pleas of frustrated fury as history writes our doomed desires onto burning singed paper; giggling idiots dream they've gone unpunished free yet the nightmare unseals before their eyes as the voiceless fate they handed to others inescapably succumbs their own...

What happens when the money runs out as it must mired in dire certitude? Do I join the army of angry arsonists scorching the planet in hellbent conviction that stamps out the middling outrage of the momentarily spared? Sometimes I cat cry but tears turn to acid scarring my face making me more hideous by the day, driving me deeper into my hole...

frozen vegetating on my recliner, waiting... wondering... wailing....

Dead Soul Dollars

"I don't know any Jesus dude!"

She'd won the day. She made it out alive, lies intact. Now she can take her millions and do anything she wants. Sunshine and roses until the day she dies - that was the plan anyway.

What she really had was darkness. Before, in the cage of lies of her marriage she at least had a direction: get money and get out. The dreams she sold herself of the paradise to come nursed her along for years, waiting for the right moment. And now it is here. And she's more afraid than ever.

"I'm useless."

She feared the crowd would turn on her for wasting life. Excuses are gone, what's wrong with you. She lived in an inescapable blackness. Money was supposed to set her free. Free to be...nothing.

Manufactured meaning failed to release her. Soup kitchens, volunteering - whatever. Nothing filled the hole inside. The idea of another marriage was completely out of the question. That door must remain forever shut.

But with that she shut out the whole of the world. Polite responses and posed smiles during the day made for harrowing loneliness in the middle of the deep night. Yes, she'd gotten away - but didn't get to anywhere. In the movies, this is where she's supposed to be celebrating and taking revenge for a life missed. Instead, it's where she found out she'd been at fault all along.

Of all the state secrets she'd held in her life, this was the worst. Stripped of her victimhood, her supporters would turn on her in vicious betrayal. Her felonious deeds would be made public, to forever live with a cold shoulder from the world. She'd wander the earth in permanent solitary confinement, a liar never to be trusted. "Just who are you, lady?" But unlike Peter of old, her denials would be without end.

Then she decided to her horror: "I must support Trump."