A shroud of ghostly light
Sunders the once dark night,
Shining on a dismal form,
On one who has done much harm
To the body that his soul now leaves;
A life that has now come to cease.

The moon casts subtle beams of grey,
Keeping the dark of night at bay,
And illuminating a cold, limp hand,
And the glint of a cast off wedding band,
All coated in a sheen of red—
A pool that grew as the monster fed.

Out of his mind it sprang,
Tearing through with claw and fang,
No longer resigned to watch and wait,
And brimming with resentful hate;
It was ready to quench its endless thirst,
And get revenge on the one it cursed.

Many times before it has hungered,
And fed upon the one who wandered
From the guiding path of light
Into this dismal stretch of night,
Evermore living with a heart of ice—
The result of gamboling with the devil’s dice.

Parallel scars line his arms,
A story of past self harms,
A timeline of his pain,
Through the days that his strength began to wane
And his mind was not his own—
Times when only in his fears was he alone.

Each time the monster in him fed,
He drew closer to his final stone clad bed,
And as the years went by,
He slowly began to die,
Fading more with every day—
Until he finally just passed away.

But on the final day of his victim’s demise,
The monster found a not so pleasant surprise,
That though his jailer had lost the battle,
He too fell out of his mighty saddle,
And the truth that he did spy,
Was that without his host he could not survive.

The monster forced the man to wield the knife,
And sever his arteries, his anchor to life,
But did not realize until too late,
That with this he had sealed his very own fate,
And he too began to drift away,
Nevermore to see the light of day.

The man was finally free of the demon’s grasp,
But the time for that was long past.
He had withered away to an empty husk,
And his soul had fled with the first sign of dusk.
The sad young man had paid the ultimate price,
Becoming a victim of the monster’s vice.