u/TheRemnantArchitect

I’m standing here now, in hopes that I’ll be,

Something bigger, someday, than just being me,

See I have a dream, to be a lighthouse for those,

That were broken and thrown to the side and were told,

That their efforts were nothing, that their best work was trash,

That every time they feel like they try hard they crash,

While the rest of the world they just sit there and laugh,

Pointing and asking “what the fuck was that?”

I built a Mansion, way deep within me,

It functions as a layout of my inner psyche,

Inside, my world is far deeper than out,

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention there's no clout,

In this for me, indiscriminately, I just feel like it’ll help someone to see,

They aren’t alone in their fucked up home,

Their truth is valid, psyche scarred to the bone.

Ruin has witnessed hell, catalogued in kind,

Battle after battle waged and transcribed,

While Keystone took up the sword and defended the line,

But lately, The Architect himself sits in the tower alone,

For Ruin and Keystone are fighting in the West Wing for home,

The ghost in the halls, they come in with a zap,

They're neurological gremlins, let's establish that,

The ghosts? They're named Shadows,

For that's what they are, they come and they rattle,

The bones of the structure, the very walls,

They're quite strong for something that simply wanders the halls,

So Keystone and Ruin, they fight together,

No matter the size of the hoard or the weather,

And report back to the Observatory they're taking a header,

So The Architect drafts up a plan, a manifesto a letter,

And sharpens his pen to protect this land,

To outline the stakes and draw the line in the sand,

He descends from the Central Tower,

Bringing with him all the firepower,

In the arsenal for he knows, If they attack it together,

They'll destroy the Shadows, and the West Wing will be better,

From now on, here and forever, they'll fight together,

Come hell or high water, to keep the Mansion from filling and being left in squalor,

Shadows replacing the air that's needed to breathe,

Being pushed out by all the machines.

The other day, I woke up and I realized,

The thing that very nearly ate me alive,

Was the very thing that should have gave me a life,

But instead it gave me trauma, worry and strife,

My brain made it a tornado, in black and white,

And I developed a need to analyze everything with my mind,

Through you, I learned that I wasn't safe deep inside,

So I compartmentalized my trauma, locked it up, lost my pride,

And the saddest thing is? I did all this to survive.

To you, my brain was a problem that needed fixed,

You claimed I "had an attitude" and I was "being a dick",

Listen up now, it's my turn you insolent pricks,

The fucked up thing is, you started off by blaming a kid,

It couldn't have been the result of adult behavior, to you,

It was just an example of what a "disrespectful" person would do,

But you see, dissent doesn't equal disrespect to me, only you,

And you see boundaries as a slight pointed at you.

My entire life, I’ve been the black sheep,

Everyone in the family was treated better than me,

Thats why I always felt like I was somewhere I didn’t belong,

And also why I stayed behind so often while you went on long,

"Vacations" to see family, to places where I'm always wrong,

Didn’t fit in, they always treated me wrong,

I could tell, they didn’t want me there,

You see, they're part of the reason I never had any air.

The other reason, well, it was you,

You couldn't understand me, claimed that I belittled you,

When I used logic to explain why I misunderstood you,

But in reality, this entire system misunderstood me,

It wrecked me, dropped me to my knees,

It forced me to hide, so you couldn't see,

The very things that made someone like me,

Feel so small and so out of touch,

Completely went against what someone who loves

A child should do when their child needs love,

Fucked up thing is you disguised it as something sent from above,

It wasn't, it was a boomers need to sweep drama under the rug,

To hide the fact that you failed your daughter,

And then the family tried to make me into a martyr,

Whether intentionally or just a product of "generational needs",

Everyone in my world was heard except me,

And for the longest time, I couldn't see,

That you only see Mike when you're looking at me,

I don’t understand though, because that shouldn't be,

I'm here now doing the work of 2 generations before me,

While you hold housing over my head,

While I fight to wrestle with this in my head,

And simultaneously fight to keep you from poisoning her head,

Destroying her mind, filling her with dread,

You don't respect boundaries, you get angry instead,

She doesn’t need the same parents that nearly left me dead,

To have any input or guidance in her life at all,

Because my goal is to stop this runaway train,

Before it ruins a third generation inside one picture frame,

You see, I recognize the words of abuse,

And every time they're employed all you'll do is you'll lose,

Access to her, for your treatment of me,

For keeping me for 30 years on my knees.

For wasting my mind, sated on nothing,

Doubting my ability, eroding me, Slowly

destroying the desire for me to heard,

So here we are now, and I'll be the first,

In the family to say no, I don’t understand,

I don’t know how you treated a child as a grown man,

I was a little adult, I never played,

I just hid in a book and wished it would all go away,

But simultaneously, you've never had faith in me,

You've bet against me continuously,

In every endeavor, but you say that you don't,

But when faced with betting on me, you won’t,

You have never had confidence in my will to be,

Better than all those that came before me.

My child, she'll be allowed to make mistakes,

Because this time? This is her safe place,

She'll never feel the way that I felt,

Tornado on the horizon while my Mansion's a hell,

Walls of flames on the outside, with a moat all around,

Chaos and screams and all other sounds,

Disappear in a vacuum that I just can’t get out,

But I promise that she'll never doubt,

She's loved, and in time she'll know about,

All the trauma I stopped and how this family about-

Faced, when I woke up and dedicated my life,

To making the next generation better than mine.

You see, I'm an Architect, more creative than most,

But I've never designed something that made me boast,

Until I realized that I was the one that matters the most,

To break the system, my brain went from being the most,

To being exactly what was needed to turn trauma into a ghost,

A ghost that will never cross the veil again,

Because it wont have a home in the Mansion she's in.

(Hook)

I want to paint you a picture, a Van Gogh if you will,

Where the brush is a pen and the canvas? Sheer will,

when the walls boiled with flame and the temperature spiked,

You jumped from the ramparts and left from my life.

(Verse)

I have no sympathy for your lack of sight,

Beginning to think that maybe Dax was right,

As men in an unreasonable plight—destined to slog,

Unconditional love really is for women, children and dogs,

You don’t ever do favors, you keep a backlog,

All along, I couldn’t see, I held up the walls while they were closing on me…

I’m gonna paint a picture of you, thorough as hell,

Using words as a brush, dipping ink from a well,

Until it sits bigger than the billboards off of US-12,

You thought you were the only voice but well,

That isn’t quite true when you try to drag a good man to hell,

That has the ability to use words as weapon,

Not to just sit back and relax but shape em and set them,

Bricks into mortar, filling the cracks,

Exposing the foundation that you so desperately lack,

You wanna go back?

I’ll Sharpen my pen, if it worked once why wouldn’t it end up workin again?

I’ll point it out once, won’t do it again,

Shady did it, put you in it, showed you his life with a pen,

So I’ll show you my world, transposed, lyrically here,

Then the picture will remain clear here for eternity, no more “they’ll see” threats, posturing lies, severing family ties to keep me from recognizing everything was a lie,

Webbed together, fractals spun forever,

Running with the tears and pain you said would get better, but never did, back then it felt like it did, hope was a tangible thing, looked kinda like smoke, until it filled up the space and I started to choke.

I held my daughter for the first time,

And realized everything I knew about being a man was a lie,

It wasn’t a man’s place to work himself to the bone,

Spend all his hours stuck at work, none at home,

Filling hearts with presents instead of presence,

Building before the foundation is present,

I redrew a system, asked for you present,

For it to be built and you grew to resent it,

So brick by brick I built my own foundation,

Even inside a psyche under hostile occupation,

Built by my hands, with mortar and trestle,

I knew that my mind would have to be the vessel,

Because you reached in and tried to distort and scheme and wrestle with the hallow cost, but it’s a holocaust, you missed the hallowed cost, and now your picture hangs in the Hall of Cost with all of my regrets, you’re programmed with settings that never will progress, a human being—flawed but lacking interest in the things that give the future hope, instead you waged a war based off of emotions never spoke,

Lobbied for vacations as a way of separation from reality,

Now you’ll see the implications that hit invocation years ago, in our broken home while I was driving up to Kokomo,

It really is possible to do everything you can and still end up with nowhere to go,

But never again will you cast the Pall inside my sacred home.