This is one of my all-time favourites, even if it is very dark and very personal. Every time I read it,  it takes me back to what might be the darkest feeling I’ve ever felt. I was so angry, literally dying of obesity, trapped in my body and only slightly more angry than I was desperate. I got home from a night out where I was pretending to be happy and bullet-proof, but squirming underneath. Desperate to get home and unleash this on a keyboard.

The Bottom

I can say with some certainty that no human has ever felt the way that I feel.
And if they have, they were as unaware of me as I am of them.
I am the only boy who has ever cried wolf,
When there really was a wolf.
Several of them, in fact.
Forever ravenous, and unaffected by my rhetoric.

Everything slips through me,
Everything sails beyond my radar’s scope.
I have stood at these locked iron gates for so long,
And there is nothing left to summon.
No battering ram.
No key-carrying cavalry to await.

I am alone, in the absolute sense of it.
I am completely isolated,
and I cannot make sense of it.

Skeletor charges his ram-shaped sceptre.
The sparks and lasers are mesmerising and terrible.
The Foot Clan gather in the shadows.
The Uruk-hai take up arms and make ready for the charge.
The Joker stands over Bruce Wayne’s corpse, and laughs.
At me.
As i cave in.
As my so-called will fails again.

What good is saying “uncle” when your own ears cannot hear it?

I stand alone, naked, decaying and in decline,
before the gates of Mordor,
Guarding my small, yellow ursine companion to the end.
Defiantly swinging him by his cotton-stuffed limb.
My only friend;
To our bitter end.

I see the swine discard my pearls.

I can blame no one.
I can trust no one.
For I am but no one.
And I am undone.

My poor, dear Yellow Bear.
I have failed you, and for that, I am sorry.
The Hundred Acre Wood has succumbed to years of deforestation.
At its boundary, only me.
Me, and darkness that darkness cannot endure.
No longer. No more.
The Uruk-hai assemble again.
And I have only this bear to defend.

The bottom tastes of alabaster.
And soot.
Shoddy masonry, if I’m honest.
But then, people don’t usually return to critsise it.

– Gord Laws, 2008