Across the sea

Back home

I wish to flee

Away from my story that has become a tome

Fighting for my life

Fighting with my men

Fighting to see my son and wife

Fighting Poseidon through year ten

I’m just a man with a ship

With one destination in mind

Praying our feet and oars don’t slip

Our hands with nothing but blood and water to find

After a cyclops, sirens, goddesses and gods

All I want is my wife to hold

To beat the odds

Is making it back to them a wish too bold?

Seeing the shores of my island

Pushing my ores through water I have swam

Feet walking over familiar sand

Tears of relief in my eyes, damn

Seeing Argos guarding the palace doors

Face white and barely lifting his head

I greet him with pets as he too old to even get on all fours

I whisper “Your duty is finished, rest now, Argos.” And as soon as I walk past him he leaves to rest with the dead

Athena hides my face as a beggar

I must hold back my relief as the war is not done

I see Penelope again and it takes everything in me not to hold her

I present her the idea of a challenge to prove her husband to be the one

Hiding suitor’s weapons to settle the score

All those fail before I drop the mask and string my old bow

Stringing Athena’s webs of strategy and war

But it’s the wrath and might of Ares that I keep in tow

My palace sacked like Troy

No wooden horse in sight to burn

Just men with threats upon my wife and boy

Lose their lives with arrows in their throats making their last words too garbled with blood to discern

After my palace is painted red

I turn and see a man, my son

Grown up without his dad

But fighting side by side as a reunion

I hold him close to my chest

He tells me I’m different than the stories

I tell him he’ll get to know me now that I can rest

We no longer have any worries

I bathe to wash myself of the blood of lesser men

Penelope is waiting for me

But I am a changed man from who I was back then

But she has been in every dream

Waiting waiting waiting

We both have for 20 years

I hope her eyes will still be loving

Her hatred is one of my worst fears

I open the door to our chambers

Our eyes meet

Penelope’s guard wavers

The distance between us now only a few feet

I am not the man you fell in love with

I have killed and sacrificed to stand

More than I can say in a breath

Red streaks on every island’s sand

Would you fall in love with me again

Knowing all I have done

No longer the kind and gentle man you knew back then

After the monster I have become

But this task you as of me now

to move our wedding bed

Is the one thing I cannot allow

The olive tree grown with our love, everlasting, that I carved with the blood and sweat I shed

Oh my dear don’t test me like this, my heart can’t take the strain

Knowing I’m the only one that wouldn’t cut its roots

But in your voice I can hear your relief and pain

Sharing you’ll fall in love with me over and over again sounds like flutes

Your arms wrap around my shoulders

My arms around your waist

The waiting is finally over

Our lips crash like waves, both of us relearning the other’s taste

I’m your and you are mine

Penelope, my beloved wife

I will never leave your side

With you I will spend the rest of my life

Oh how I love you

I’ll repeat the words “I do”

As many times as I need to

After what we’ve both gone through

All credit to Jorge Rivera-Herrans and his beautiful creation of "EPIC: The Musical" that inspired this poem.

I shattered my parents trust and faith in me when I almost flunked out of college this past semester and didn't tell my parents about how bad grades were getting until final grades came out. I decided to withdraw, but I had broken the promises I made to my parents that I would actually seek help from professors, go to counselling, take my medication, go to classes, and that I would be more honest with them in general.

#challenge

Kate spent her morning like she did every morning; cleaning her small arsenal of guns which included: 2 twin pistols with pearl handles, her sniper, and rifle. While she mostly used her pistols and sniper, she still kept the rifle she used for her first kill. Her first kill being her alcoholic, abusive father that used both her and her mother as outlets of anger and stress when he came home in a drunken rage. One night, when she was only 9 years old, her mother couldn't take the abuse anymore and after tucking Kate in, her mom used the rifle that was hidden in the house to kill herself, hearing the gunshot, Kate ran into her parents’ room to see her dead mother lying on the wood floor, blood everywhere and rifle hanging limply from her cold hand. After crying over her mother’s body she took the rifle and waited by the door. When her father came home that night, she pulled the trigger while looking straight into his eyes, not blinking as she fired. That was the first time she had ever fired a gun, and certainly wasn't the last as over the next 10 years she had lost count of the number of lives under her belt. Now she was 19, had dyed black streaks into her naturally red hair, and was sitting in her usual crappy motel room that she would stay in as she traveled the country obeying only her bloodlust. She drove a classic 1965 Ford Mustang that she stole as soon as she was 16 and could pass at being a driver to cops. Before then she just hitchhiked or took busses.

The ice-blue-eyed killer stuck to her pistols and occasionally her sniper for her kills, but also occasionally loved to torture her victims if she had the time. She scouted out for people that were assholes, who where rats in a society that wouldn't miss them. Her choice of victims gave her an advantage as they practically always had many enemies and people that hated them. Meaning that police and the FBI had dozens to hundreds of suspects surfacing with every kill she made, keeping them far enough away from her tail. While she kept continuities slim, she always left her signature shot straight through the right eye. The killing shot leading the press and authorities to dub the serial killer nicknames of "Deadeye", "The Blind Shot", "The Executioner", "The Cross-Country Killer", and a couple others.

After she was done cleaning her guns, she placed them in her grey duffle bag before she left the room to go take a shower, the water was barely warm and had horrible water pressure but she still got herself clean before turning the shower off and getting dry so she could change into a black tank top, a pair of torn dark blue jeans, her combat boots and pull on her long gloves that ended ⅔ up her bicep. The gloves hid the rows upon rows of horizontal raised, white scars covering of her forearms and wrists. Some had faded over the years, but there were still too many to try to count.

Sliding on her dark rectangular sunglasses, she took her duffle full of guns and a change of clothes out to her car where she placed the guns in the false bottom of the trunk and the duffle left with clothes on top of the cover of the secret compartment. Closing the trunk and climbing in the driver’s seat, she turn the key, bringing the car to life as well as music to blast from the speakers. She mostly listened to classic rock, so the song blaring was “Back in Black” by AC/DC. Smiling as she pulled out of the parking spot, she started singing along with the song as she pulled out of the motel’s parking lot onto the empty morning road close to the highway, merging onto the road as she drove to find the next town where she would find her next victims.

#serialkiller#challenge#prose#oldcharacter#backstory

Once I was seven years old my father told me

You should yourself some friends or you'll be lonely

Once I was seven years old

It was an awkward world, I wanted to be better

Changing myself because I thought it would earn me friends faster

By eleven moving houses and starting middle school

Two weeks and students started spreading a stupid rumor

Once I was twelve years old my one friend told me

I’m moving, make new friends or you’ll be lonely

Once I was twelve years old

In the fall I met the first friends who accepted me

I started loving being me, thank you Kat and Crowley

My parents didn’t like their living and tried to stop me

Triggered depression cause I wouldn’t leave my new family

Once I was fifteen years old, I had left Crowley

For a year of crippling anxiety

Once I was fifteen years old

Back at public after my freshman failure

Knew I was bi as my crush grew into something major

I only told Crowley and my friends that matter

In theatre you’ll see me as an elf in the play in winter

Once I was sixteen years old, my story got told

I was writing horror that had made people scared of me

Once I was sixteen years old

Soon I’ll be twenty years old, college is my goal

Graduating in two years and I’m still learning

Soon I’ll be twenty years old

I’m still working for my life

See a therapist to help me

become a happier person

Not one trapped in depression

I'm still best friends with Crowley

while at different universities

And one more, though we don’t speak much

Sara I feel so sorry

Soon I’ll thirty years old, my dad’s now at sixty-three

Remember life now that you’re at a better place to be

Teaching to kids that are in places where I was once

I hope to see my friends maybe every couple of months

Soon I’ll be thirty years old, will I still feel numb and cold

Or will I have a life I love and makes me happy

Soon I'll be thirty years old

Soon I’ll be thirty years old, will I still feel numb and cold

Or will I have a life I love and makes me happy

Soon I'll be thirty years old

Once I was seven years old my father told me

You should yourself some friends or you'll be lonely

Once I was seven years old

Once I was seven years old

#song #parody #life

Sometimes I think I’ve lived too long,

been a burden too long,

been a problem too long,

been a failure too long,

been a disappointment too damn long.

Why is my heartbeat still going on

Keeping my blood pumping

Veins and arteries with something

My heart doing its job to keep me alive

but did I really survive

this damn long

I feel like I’m always wrong

I am less certain of my state

while under my depression sedate

But as the years have gone to lore

I think I’ve been half-dead for

too damn long

When did I last sing a happy song?

My mask has quite a past

Will it ever end or even just subside?

I don’t know how much longer I can lie

To people with an “I’m fine.”

Faking a laugh before drinking from a cup

Forcing a smile I’ve been holding up

too damn long

Brief moments of joy come along

And I want them to never end

This is happiness I can’t comprehend

My facade falls

And I show my flaws

And I’m still happy

Sorry for sounding sappy

But I can sing a song

It’s been too damn long

Now I feel so strong

It’s been so many years

Since I’ve shed so few tears

Felt less like a loner

From my depression I was sober

I’ve turned a new leaf

I feel more like the real me

It’ll never be too damn long

#poetry #burn out #depression

As a fallen angel,

wings stripped of their feathers

by the demons from my mind’s hell

my strength slowly withers.

But I will rebuild my wings

with every new feather

adds a new page to the rings

that bind my book of leather.

This book of mine

tells the story of redemption

over the course of time

as I battle my depression.

The demons take my pen

and tell me to just stop trying,

to just give in

and get busy dying.

However I steal the pen back

before I can doubt

and numb myself black

to block them out.

This book of feathers is my mission

my scarred skin makes its bind

my blood of crimson iron inks its inscription

my bone makes its spine.

By finishing this book before I die

I hope these pages put together

will rebuild my wings and let me fly

so I can show all my book of feathers.

#poetry

#writing

#challenge

Before You Start Your Day

March To The Sea

Isle Of Flightless Birds,

Fairly Local

Hometown Heathens,

Semi-Automatic

Guns For Hands,

Fake You Out,

Fall Away

The Run And Go, Goner.

Stressed Out,

Heavydirtysoul,

Tear In My Heart,

Migraine,

Truce.

Ode To Sleep

Holding On To You

Car Radio

Taxi Cab Ride

A Car, A Torch, A Death

Oh Ms Believer,

Implicit Demand For Proof

Addict With A Pen

Friend, Please

We Don't Believe What's On TV

Not Today

Doubt The Judge Message Man.