Criticism and Critiques Welcomed?

Thinking smugly you are safe, pitfalls yet unknown yawn,

desperate to devour.

By choice or circumstance falling blindly into the abyss,

where memories slither past like monsters in the dark.

Biting, stinging, haunting from within.

Bound securely in the world of your creation,

ceasing that rancorous alliance.

So dangerously comfortable...so foolishly complacent,

swaddled safely within the warmth of new life, you become lax-

easing the Post at the gate.

The mind has never forgotten.

No longer vexing memories as an errant tongue besets the

emptiness where once a tooth grew firm.

It belies the truth of its intent,

waiting silently, ever the Sentinel.

Vulnerability the wailing Siren song that

now exposed hastens them to you with sickening speed.

Awash in a pestilent sea of self loathing

crumbling walls reveal the bones-no truth can be unlearned.

The black soaked through.

Lost to fetid times that have no remorse.

Bitterness choking, gagging on things imagined dead.

Struggling to amend, burning to become the Phoenix,

to rise from the ashes of the past.

Clean. Reborn.

No Saint left to absolve your sins, no kiln to fire them hence.

Left hidden behind your curtain of pleasantry,

pretending to be whole.

The truths resound within-you can never go back.

The price paid for a life lived.

Truth behind the loss of innocence.

Deadly knowledge so avidly sought,

that hounds with all of Lucifer's cunning and mercy.

Awareness of your passion's limits serves understanding to oneself.

An awakening without reprieve.