Precious Life

Living is a gift that has no measure,

And life is precious so they say,

But for some joy is a stolen treasure,

A new trial begins a new day.

Back in time on a journey,

To a world of guilt and shame,

A dead body lay upon a hospital gurney,

Because it's mind had gone insane.

It began with stolen innocence,

An impressionable young schoolboy,

Forced into acts that made no sense,

The subject, the clergy's toy.

Emotions clouded with confusion,

Masked a seething, bitter rage,

Normality smiled a secret illusion,

While vengeance rattled the door of its cage.

You're the angriest man I've ever met,

The doctor diagnosed,

A glass half empty with burning regret,

Primed the bomb that would explode.

Twenty years from trauma run,

A slow poisoning of the self,

From dawn to the setting of the sun,

Life gathered dust upon a shelf.

A cross was scratched into the sand,

By a fleeing, defeated mind,

Pointed the way by one's own hand,

To the brutal and unkind.

Eight inches of razor, knife edge steel,

Savaged through the wrist,

From an ugly gash blood gushed unreal,

Falling backwards through the mist.

In a bloodbath found but not in time,

Screeching sirens in the night,

Suffocate to death, pay for your crime,

Dead on arrival began the fight.

Blessed failure, still of Earthly realm,

Forever left to wander,

Sanity now restored to the helm,

Precious life always to ponder.

David Vitali 2017.