PAINTED

I am a portrait of anguish. Conceived by the images of the deceased. Glossed with a dark ink of torment. My face is screaming silently of agony; a protruding skull on canvass, wrapped in pale skin. I could have fallen out of the frame if not for these dead veins that embrace my bloodless chest.

Then Death came and signed a contract of life for me. Pulled out from the painting, I walk this afterlife of black and gray.

I am now in this opera where the stage is a throne of bone. I entertain condemned souls with surreal imitations of the living. Though this existence is short of reality, I relish every breath. I embrace every sound of apathetic clapping and lifeless laughing from an audience of degenerates. I savor every sensation of this animated body.

Just as I somehow started to appreciate living, Death came back to end my contract.

I ran through the crowd of shadows. I hid in the midst of dead vests. But, with only a tragic stare from his hollow eyes, I felt the air seized from me. I am weakened. And as I tremble, this body is turning to mist. The canvass is sucking me back. And I cease to live.

Death is my artist. Life is what i am deprived of, and it is what the living can't see... in this horrid masterpiece that is me.