A pandemonium rises in my head… I want to abandon this cacophony but it hounds me everywhere….

I am damned… I must be, to end up being punished like this… castigated…my subsistence, an abomination to the word creation… I am but the excreta of the demons I have fornicated with …

The voices wail inside my mind…professing how my repulsive existence can find no redemption on this earth… I taint all those I cherish… debase all those I touch…condemn all those I love…

I must concede… I must surrender to the power that will absolve me from this fetid stench of misery that corrodes my very being…I must sanctify all that I have defiled… my death would end it all….

I conform to their dictum that I take him with me… he too is cursed…. the screams grow more raucous by the minute...firmly I embrace him as I jump out my 2nd floor window…I pray for the fall to impale me upon on the jagged edges of my million sins…it is but my cursed fate that I still do not die…..

I hasten up the stairs again… clinging to him as I tear up what now seems to be a mountain…the wailing in my head beckons me to join them… we jump again… I feel the asphalt against my cheek, my palms grazed and bleeding…. the rending pain arising from my now misshapen arm tells me I am still alive…he doesn’t move…his breathing faint as his chest moves tenuously …

The screams inside my head have evolved into an uproar in whose bondage my hands move in mechanical dissociation…we must be liberated from the restraints that hold us here in order to redeem ourselves… lest we are ensnared in this anathema forever….

I walk as if in a dream… having no recollection of how I ended up in the garage… the voices now turn into a chant… I will be baptized again… the rites shall be executed… I empty the can of gasoline around us…. clutching him close to my heart I pray to God for mercy and absolution… I look at him one last time… as my trembling hands light the match…. I see the flames lick at the scars of my guilt….opening the gates to our deliverance…

……………………………………………………………………

Behind these frigid bars all I do is sit and scratch at the crusted memories of that incinerated evening…. in this medicated swoon the voices lie pacified…I don’t remember much… all I remember is the excruciating pain I awoke to…a fractured arm… weeping wounds and my scorched skin…

I hide behind the label of ‘psychosis’…I cower behind these iron bars to save me from myself…..I cannot be vindicated from my own brutality…I will live the rest of my life drowning in this deluge of scalding tears…to know that I killed him… he was 4 months old… my baby….


(in case anyone is wondering.. this happened in CT)