Somewhere in the night, under a flickering neon sign that hums like a dying prayer, the answer waits.
It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t wave you in.
It just glows—cold, patient, and already knowing you won’t listen.
There are no friends on these streets.
Only hands that reach out to take,
eyes that scan for weakness,
souls too cracked to hold a reflection anymore.
The lost guiding the lost,
spiraling down the drain of “whatever comes next.”
No purpose. No pause.
Just the endless motion of ghosts chasing warmth they burned long ago.
They call it living—
I call it the madness of not thinking past your own sight.
They hear you, but they won’t open the door.
Locked. Bolted.
You can knock, but the silence answers louder.
Odd jobs to earn another shot in the dark—
a paycheck, a pill, a hit, a high.
It’s been so long they forgot what they were running from.
But someone remembers that night.
Someone always does.
They see you,
but only through the lens of what you can give
before they crawl back to their corner of the void.
You can’t outwork a crackhead chasing God through a glass pipe.
They’re already gone.
Zombies in waiting,
counting down to nothing.
I watch from the tower.
The light burns out sometimes,
but I keep the watch.
Hated for what I wanted.
Hated for what I built.
Hated because there’s nothing left in it for them.
Forgiveness?
That’s a word they can’t pronounce anymore.
They choke on it,
same as truth.
You learn that silence is mercy—
some things rot faster when you try to explain.
They say, “We can still be friends.”
But we were never friends at all.
When the hard times hit,
take a look around the yellow brick road—
see who’s standing at the crossroads.
If they’re still there,
turn left.
They’ll never be right.
There’s a hotel room off the main drag,
two lights and curtains sewn shut to keep out the sun.
A blue shirt on a chair.
A gray backpack.
A heartbeat trying to remember why it stayed.
You don’t want anything from them
but a conversation—
it’s been too long since you stopped talking inside your own head.
The monsters get restless when they don’t have a voice.
The smoke rewires the brain,
makes memory taste like metal.
And somewhere far from this city’s hum,
down a dirt road the GPS forgot,
there’s a small house glowing like forgiveness.
A life filled with love and noise and Sunday mornings.
The kind of life you could never touch.
You’re the outsider looking in,
face against the glass.
They’ll play the “Remember when” game someday,
and your name won’t come up.
But you’ll still know—
you were there.
You saw it.
You kept the light burning
in the Neon Watchtower.
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