his tortured poetry

i think 
in my past life
i was 
a tortured poet.
a man with no escape from his mind,
beard stubbled and heart jaded,
from the exhaustion of his own thoughts.
thoughts confined by a moral code of his own creation,
and a can do attitude to a fault, 
his own fault.
he's never really been hurt,
but he's tortured in the mind,
by himself, 
and by the souls he once longed for attention from.
his exterior body mangled from the truths that lie within,
patiently waiting for the inevitable outpour of emotion.
he lives near a pond of tears,
a forest of social normalcy,
a moat of pain.
he finds solace in the little ways life and the universe try to mend his tortured soul.
he writes beautiful stories that fluctuate in sanity
as his words smile and mask the depth of his mortal soul.
on the outside his person is carefully organized and every detail is meticulously tended,
but the inside looks more like the disheveled mess of a hospital room that holds a man minutes from death.
death by his own torture.
his soul is broken in ways he won't pretend he understands.
the patterns of his life,
marked by his self preserved unending sorrow,
his poetry is painted by the perils of his own
sick
tortured
mind.