My Monstrous Modern Soul

Once more, as Hamlet said,
like a whore I unpack my heart with words...
!!and what a Monstrous modern heart it is!!:
as melancholy as lead,
rabidly enraged but full of dread,
haunted by better things I've been and said,
struck with terrible, chronic pain:
psychological, physical, and "spiritual."
(a word I use for lack of one more specific)
striving, so oft in vain
to escape this substance addled decay,
full of desire to transcend
!!but with a dreadful tendency to stay!!
stuck in the menial fray.

Yeah, it's a bleak picture I paint today,
not because I'm really hopeless
and Much less because I enjoy sharing this:
I'd like to be silent about this clenching pain
that holds my back in its fiery reaper's grip;
I'd like to pretend that I'm normal and rational:
a sipper of liquor whose lunacy is purely artful.

Yes, I am a man of great suffering
and even greater, colossal confusion:
but the truths of the age my pen oft sings
and I'm proud of many good deeds that I've done;
No, I'll not share my every skeleton with the public sun,
but what I've shared today I should have Long ago done.