Madness has Front Row Seats

(The first draft of this poem was written in Swedish back in 2012, but when I decided to translate it, I ended up rewriting most of it)
2014-02-19 01:43 AM

"Life is a journey, and for the first time
you had a destination, an end, in sight"
Or some other such tired lines
torn up and stitched together,
distorted,

cloaked in curtains of smoke
where thin light rays
breaks through that black painted window
where our destructive past patterns
hid inside weary metaphors

Like the ocean waves
you crashed into that wall
that you usually close yourself into
as soon as anything becomes
even remotely tangible;

reenacting your paranoid visions in a theatre
by running away from the hungry ghosts
that sharpen their nails so that they
can tear down the barriers between your two worlds,
not realizing that madness has front row seats

I can see all of it:
their malevolence smiling
as they predict your coming stumbles
over their yellow skeletons
that have been thrown out of your closets

And the pain consumes me
whenever I think of how you shouted
that you're afraid of living,
terrified of confronting your past
yet petrified at the thought of running in circles;

it annihilates my tranquility
to remember that moment
when you realized that
the revenants' laughter
testified to your lack of self-worth

I remember it as if it was yesterday,
that night when we stood on an abandoned beach
pretending to be airplanes
until we crashed into reality,
and your evanescent smile fully collapsed,

turning your beautiful face into a blank page
where the hive-mind of our dreams dying,
carved in incantations to summon
the awesome presence of the
conscious silence of perpetual hell

Because I saw everything,
from those moments of victory,
where your love conquered suffering;
where your bad jokes broke the ice;
where your serenity blossomed

until when your pride
had turned into self-loathing,
shifting your life into downward spirals
leading up to that moment, in that theatre,
where you laid down in eternal rest

And the grim beauty of watching
the demons auctioning off your skull
turned my grief into laughter;
my scars into artwork;
and my life into decay.