The Autobiography Of Decadence

You give your life everything.

Every time.

Every place.

Every form.

No safety nets, no emergency exits.

Just hurling yourself headfirst into an empty pool

and pretending the concrete isn’t waiting with a grin.

And every single time, the world says, 

No.

Not the polite kind.

Not the “try again” kind.

The kind that watches you knock

so it can slam the door on your face, harder than yesterday.

The kind that leaves your knuckles bruised and cut open

and asks, silently, why you even bothered.

On paper, you’re every inch of the substance legends are made of.

A biography of wins, scars, and headlines

that could convince a stranger you’ve cracked life’s code.

But paper is a trained empath and an incredible liar.

Truth be told? 

You’re worn out steel succumbing to the slow rot of rust and resistance —

too stubborn to collapse,

too proud to hide the rot.

You let the decay show, brick by brick,

so the audience knows the price of standing.

At some point, you’re not chasing the dream anymore.

The dream is ashes in someone else’s fire.

You’re not after the cause either. 

That flag’s been trampled into mud so long

you can’t even read what it said, anymore.

You move because stopping tastes worse than swallowing glass.

You tell yourself it’s about winning.

It’s not.

It’s about refusing to be that shamless bastard

who dropped his fists first.

This isn’t hope.

Hope is for fools who still think life pays rent.

This is a dare with no audience, no applause, no reward.

One last round before the floor swallows you whole.

Not because you think you’ll land the punch,

but because you want the bastard across from you

to remember exactly who you were

when the lights died.

That’s not romance.

That’s a death wish in leather stitched from your own pride and skin.

Hope is for lovers —

the wide-eyed, the stupidly brave,

the ones who think a kiss still matters.

Resignation is for the terminally certain —

the ones who’ve read the ending a hundred times

and still walk into the story,

not to rewrite it,

but to see if maybe this time

the guillotine hesitates,

just long enough

to let them spit in its eye.