Honest Abe

Did it feel like you were shrouded in sadness,
Before the bullet ended your thoughts, were they already coated in that stench of death?
That folding blackness, Abe, did it roil day and night,
Never alone, but always lonely, the tar pitch staining your happiness?
Every day tinged with melancholy and foreboding,
Knowing that there were people you had never met who wanted you dead?
And why?
Why these thoughts, Abe?
From where did they originate?
From whence did they come?
People. People are so awful.
Not all people, clearly, but enough to taint all joyful things in despair.
The happy cries of children, the smiles of old couples walking hand in hand,
Dulled, made profane, decomposing thoughts take hold.
Vibrant red and gold balloons, dimmed to a gray, as if wallowed in soot.
Is this what it felt like to live, Abe?
Did every sharpened observation become a dagger in your mind,
Penetrating your very soul?
Did the fangs of human avarice: for wealth, for power, for innocence,
Eat away at your mind as you watched them pursue those desires like starving wolves?
How much of you was truly left for that bullet to find, Abe?
Sometimes I wonder if, in those last moments, you experienced relief.
Not the relief of dying, but the relief of being dead, and being free of humanity’s curse.
It feels like a curse to be human. To be around humans.
They say so many things, but you don’t know if they mean them.
Humans meddle too much, Abe. They won’t leave anybody alone.
They crawl into everyone’s safe spaces and make their presence required.
They molest the earth, the flora, the fauna, and even one another.
They won’t leave us be, Abe. They insist on enforcing their ideas upon each living being.
They can’t just let others live their lives in peace.
Is that what you felt every day of your existence?
I believe it was. I read your words, when you would bare your soul, Abe.
Your poor soul, beaten, worn, half-eaten by the blackness that infected your every waking moment.
I know how you felt, Abe. I know how you felt every day.
My heart aches for you, Abe, for what you felt, what you knew.
I feel, and I know.
I feel, and I know.
I feel, and I know.