They say "you are not allowed to be happy,"
"You are not allowed to be proud."

That you must sit with this inky feeling in your stomach,
This red rock. This burning heat. This eternal damnation;
The artist's anchor, pulling you down, sunken-deep.

There are breathless oceans in your lungs
There is ice and fire and cut glass
There is the Devil in the seed 
Doubt. Doubt. Doubt speaks to me

It is this sensation which drives me 
For, and against

There is no love without struggle
No duty without responsibility
No recognition without faith
I ask you thus: will you have loyalty?
Or will you sink into immaterialism; into a faded cognition of what you could've seen
Of what I could've been?

So ask me questions,
There is beauty beneath the cloak.