An empty town, a life so far.

Fleeting hope, the white-lie stars.

Everything comes back to nothing.

The horror of familiarity.

 

I am sick, dying from

The bittersweet autumns, the season of quiet deaths.

The hungry winters, feeding into the gluttonous darkness.

The decaying springs, vaunting rotting growth and old bones.

The stinging summers, the air sweet like acid.

I have lived them all.

The horror of familiarity.

 

The tragedy of being known here, I fear,

Is an unavoidable one.

Like the starcrossed lovers—

I take in the poison of observation,

Drive in the dagger of conceit.

And no matter how many times the curtain falls,

The story will remain the same.

I will never achieve perfect catharsis here.

The horror of familiarity.

 

The autumns have not been the same for years,

And are tinged with an unsung hope.

Every song I will ever know is about a winter,

One that will never happen again because they will never happen again.

Springtime is the graveyard for some specific,

Decaying forever, buried how I will always remember them.

Summer’s burning air is filled with laughter and chatter,

I can still pick out their voice, like an island in the sea of strangers.

These ghosts want to leave and I want to help them.

But I’m not well educated on emotional exorcisms,

And neither are these phantoms.

Still, they torment, clawing and howling inside me on even the most freeing of days.

The horror of familiarity.

 

 

Even if these ghosts cannot flee, I can.

I can go where where seasons hold no memories,

Where spirits dare not haunt and songs do not remind me of snowfall.

I will meld into the faceless crowd and flourish in the unknown.

And, I pray, that before nostalgia sinks its fangs into my neck,

I will kiss the dust in a place that will not remember me,

And I will smile, knowing I escaped it all,

The horror of familiarity.