Canvas.

Every brushstroke I make is wrong.

Every twist and turn of my wrists, fingers, and the brush in my hand is imperfect and flawed.

I keep moving, spiralling into a deeper state of agony as I see a nightmare pour onto the blank slate before me.

I wear my expressions on my sleeve, seeming utterly enraptured by the next magnum opus that falls out of me and onto the equally plain canvas.

The truth is, I feel nothing for the work. 

All of the passion in my body, once hot and all-empowering, pumping the vitriol through my fragile form - Gone.

Simplistically and really gone.

I have no idea where it's hiding, or if it still even lives on within the darkest part of my metaphoric corners.

All I can do is work on finding it again.

Or cry to myself, admitting defeat.

Pride is a sin. So is envy.

Envy over those once in my sphere, like some metaphysical pantheon, now lifted from the unsafe chambers of adolescence. The old guard, changed, but never replaced for God knows what reason.

I see them, talking, wining and dining off of their thickly stacked wallets. I see them feel safe and comfortable with their tiny lives, knowing that they know, deep down, they're already dead. Dead to the dreams and wishes from their childhood.

It's entropy. Oroborous. A never ending cycle of despair and anger, without any trace of hope of happiness.

So why don't I sell myself off like a whore, as they have chosen to do?

I'm better than them. All of them.

I feel a different fire inside of me. A dark fire. Reversed, sucking in the joy and sorrow in my veins as fuel, instead of burning all around it indiscriminately. It's focused, never going out of control.

Pure, dark, rage.

A rage that I keep stored away in my soul, twisted and tortured, not just by my own admission.

Mammy and Daddy loved to know what was going on in my head. The docs and throbbers poking through my grey matter with sharp fingers and words. Always the same diagnosis, just in a new disguise.

Suddenly.

My muse comes to me, in flashes of golden greens. The shapely hip, the full bosom, the Venusian face. A beauty beyond all imagination.

She understands me. she knows my needs and fulfils them. The takes me into her and whispers:

"I know you. As you will come to know me."

I wrestle with my negativity for her. I fight the beasts within. All to see her look to me and open herself up, beckoning me in from the madness.

She does look to me, but she is transformed. A child of rage and envy. A beauty, to some far-gone patient of termination. A release. A guiding light.

A dark light. Crimson sickness pushed onto me by my own hands.

Imperfect hands.

I take my brush and make my stand, a defence, a shield to block the possibility.

Apathetic defence.

She peels it back and consumes it, as only sickness and hunger can. Chewing upon my person with grinning fangs, slowly becoming charper, hooking into me.

I'm addicted to her pain.

She makes me tick, tick, tick.

I hear the clock as I awake to a blank canvas once more.

The cycle begins again.

I weep.

I take up my brush.

Everything Brushstroke I make is wrong.

And it's the only comfort I know.