Sinister Ecstasy Saved by Sacred Love
An Original Wayward Purpose Poem
I'll keep this brief. Over the past two months, I’ve poured my heart into writing this piece because I needed to work through an inner struggle. This poem became a space where I could begin healing from deep moral injury. The rupture, the loss of my inner authority, the old weight I’ve carried for a long time, and all the moral injury. Each line was a step closer to myself, and every revision was like a small exorcism. It’s not polished or perfect; it's a form of therapy shaped in words. If anything here touches you, it’s because I wrote from an honest, painful place.
Sinister Ecstasy Saved by Sacred Love
I was a child who built his own walls.
Long before rank, long before ruin,
long before I learned to stand watch over others,
I learned to stand watch over myself.
In the woods behind the house,
there was a clearing only I knew,
and in it, a shack I built with my own hands.
From time borrowed against my youth.
Hammer, nails, splintered boards,
the discipline of a boy who wanted
one place in the world he controlled.
One room that was mine.
My first four walls.
With a door only I controlled.
Not a fortress,
a shelter.
Not a home,
a holding cell for feelings I did not yet have the words to name.
And I carried that room into adulthood.
Carried it into the uniform.
Into deployments.
Into silence.
Into trips away.
Into the places where I became
my own watchtower, sentry, overwatch.
Because no one else was allowed inside.
Not really.
Every base, every barracks, every briefing
was just another version
of that shack in the woods.
Four walls around a boy
trying to survive himself.
And now, here I am again.
But then the room shifts.
The echoes sharpen;
past judgments,
confusion,
noise.
Signal or flatline?
Walls that once held meaning
now crack under the pressure of shadows.
I am okay.
“I am not okay,”
the room says back to me.
Shame pools in the corners,
authority drains like water under the door,
and the room fills with the smell of
old grief, old chaos, old presence.
Not apathy…armor.
Not silence…self-defense.
The triple-edged blade of blame
carved into three walls at once:
Upward.
Downward.
Inward.
Corrosion in the paint.
Morality injured in the dust.
Names folded into the floorboards,
mourned, forgotten, moth-eaten.
Time rippling against the drywall.
Asbestos of the soul
drawn in chalk.
A low hum,
survival masquerading as strength.
Mind. Flame. Grief. Voice…Betrayal.
All trapped within four walls.
Walls borrowed.
Built.
Rented.
Destroyed.
Walls collapsed.
Empathy dressed as insecurity.
A mirror reflecting an internal storm.
“I’ve failed,” the ceiling cracks.
“I’m broken,” the floor groans.
“I’m beyond repair,” the walls whisper.
Stop.
Unspoken words die in this room
when pride pretends to be protection.
The label they gave you
left on a shelf like a returned package.
But inside, the circle waits:
black, hollow,
a signal gone dark.
Never red, never yellow, never green…
just empty.
Still.
Watching.
Waiting.
The unanswered voicemail of a new generation.
No tape, no rewind, no record.
Just hollowed out circles.
The wounds say:
”I choose.”
”I can make it right.”
But another voice answers;
a whisper in the dark:
I.
Got.
You.
Or, do I?
Do you?
The room shakes with the question.
Collapse.
Corruption.
Silence.
Meaning slipping through the cracks.
A medal glinting on a dusty shelf;
gold on the outside,
decay beneath.
The fire flares:
I.
Don’t.
Care.
Yet the ashes gather,
and from them, meaning rises;
not neat,
not gentle,
but real.
This room becomes an exorcism,
not a sanctuary.
Guilt.
Blame.
Shame.
Three shadows pacing the walls.
”Are you the fourth?”
The room asks.
Victim or participant?
Chaos or clarity?
Complicity or confusion?
Judge, jury, and executioner,
but all of them…
You?
Fog. Dust.
A dirt-filled floor.
Spiritual housecleaning
in half-darkness.
“I’m wounded,”
one wall says.
“They failed me,”
another whispers.
“I did wrong,”
the third admits.
“I’m healing,”
the fourth finally breathes.
The ceiling lifts, and the floor vanishes.
Two truths.
One lie.
The room holds all three.
You stagger.
I fall.
But the room does not collapse.
You rise within it,
not with ease;
I watch alongside the shadow.
You speak a verse I can not hear
I fall? You stand.
Sinister…Yes,
but without weariness.
Faith.
Discipline.
Direction.
The three beams
cutting through the dark.
Enticement. Entrapment. Endorsement. Enslavement.
But still;
you refocus.
Not resist.
Respond.
Not react.
Temptation sits at the table.
The room knows it.
So do You.
So do I.
Then comes betrayal;
the rupture;
the abyss.
Not overflowing.
Just…empty.
“What’s that?”
you ask.
From the far corner,
barely audible:
I.
Am.
Here.
Hastily written lines on the wall.
Doubt, diversion, defeat, delay;
none of them win.
Because You speak back.
Honesty for the complex mind.
Wisdom dripping slowly like honey
into the cracks.
You are not the fourth rider.
You are a beast of burden;
steady, bruised, faithful.
The one who carries hope
through ruin.
A flame that illuminates
but does not burn.
A quiet mercy
standing in the center
of four walls.
The room does not own You.
You name it.
You transform it.
And now;
for the first time
since the woods,
the shack,
the childhood,
the uniform,
the overwatch,
since the long silent wars;
You open the door.
You do not step out alone.
You step back
and make space.
A space for her.
For the one You love.
For the one we trust.
For the one who can sit with us
in the place you never let anyone enter.
I invite you into the hollowed ark,
the room I built to survive,
the room I hid in,
the room that once saved me
and almost killed me,
the room where I finally learned
what love asks for:
Not perfection.
Not armor.
Not overwatch.
Presence.
Honesty.
You.
And you.
And you.
And I.
For love like ours;
wounded, stubborn, true;
is shaped by God
inside the walls we fear the most.
And it is healed
the moment I say:
This room is no longer mine alone.
Come in.
Stay.
I want you here with Us.
I want you here with me.
But before I let you in,
you should know
what this room has held.
The self-torture of mind and soul,
thoughts ricocheting like loose rounds,
ideas sprinting faster
than I could ever command,
a thousand unfinished sentences
stacked like ammo cans
against the wall.
Trauma rewired the circuits,
turned every whisper into a warning,
every pause into a threat,
every shadow into surveillance.
My own mind became
the loudest room I lived in.
Internal authority died young,
the voice that should have guided me
fractured into too many frequencies.
multi-frequency hoping;
Voices yelling, doubting, disappearing;
begging for silence.
And in that static,
The adversary was me.
I punished myself
for not being linear, easy, quiet;
for not being normal.
A neurodivergent mind
is not an enemy;
but in trauma,
it becomes a maze
with no diagram,
no legend,
no exit sign.
This room remembers
every time I tried to discipline myself
into a shape I was never meant to be.
Every failed attempt at stillness.
Every secret breakdown behind closed doors
while collapsing inside.
It remembers
the days when being different
felt dangerous.
When thinking too deeply
felt like a liability.
When feeling too strongly
felt like a threat.
And still,
you stand at the doorway,
steady,
unafraid,
waiting for me to invite you inside.
I am
who I want to be;
not despite the chaos,
but born through it.
Don’t connect?
I always did.
Too much.
Too intensely.
Too honestly.
So I shut every door
And boarded up the windows
before anyone could enter the blast radius.
But now I choose differently.
I open the door
not because the room is perfect,
but because you are the one
I trust to sit with me
in the unfinished,
unfiltered,
unfixed places.
Because the truth is;
I didn’t build this room to heal.
I built it to hide.
Not just from the world,
not just from those I served beside,
not just from the missions
that stripped pieces off me,
I built it to hide
from the boy I used to be.
The one in the woods
hammering stolen nails
into stolen boards,
with stolen time,
trying to build a place
where nothing could hurt him
if he hurt himself first.
The one who learned too early
that adults break things
they swear they’ll protect.
That promises rot faster
than plywood in the rain.
That they leave unanswered,
even on their deathbeds;
that love can be loud one day…
And gone the next.
That silence is safer
than being seen.
Thats what I told myself.
I thought the shack I built
was shelter.
But it was a coffin I climbed into
again and again,
thinking if I could make myself small enough,
quiet enough,
obedient enough,
maybe I wouldn’t be left behind.
And when the uniform came,
I just traded one set of walls
for another.
Camouflage doesn’t just hide you
from the enemy.
It hides you from yourself.
Years of overwatch
taught me to see danger
before it happened,
but not how to see the danger
of living unseen.
I grieved in advance
every person I loved,
because I couldn’t imagine
a world where anyone
would stay.
So I learned to walk myself
into this room
before anyone else could leave me in it.
I learned to close the door
before love could cross it.
I learned to call my own suffering discipline,
my own collapse duty,
my own isolation strength.
But now,
you’re standing here
in the doorway I kept shut
for decades.
You’re not asking me to be better.
You’re asking me to be honest.
You’re not asking me to be strong.
You’re asking me to be with you.
No rank, no armor,
no overwatch,
no mission.
Just a man
finally brave enough
to let someone see
the parts of him
he never forgave.
And the moment you step inside,
this room stops being
the place I survive,
and becomes the place
I am finally…
Allowed to live.
With you by my side.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and for being part of my healing. If any part of it spoke to you, feel free to share it with someone who might need it. And if you want to keep walking this journey with us at Wayward Purpose, you’re welcome to subscribe.
One of the first steps in healing moral injury is simply getting the truth out of your head and onto paper, journals, poems, scraps of honesty that help you see what happened with clarity instead of shame. Writing this has been part of my own repair.
Wishing you a good day, and the courage to keep putting words to what hurts, because that’s where the healing begins.