Chuck Rienhardt (AZ) Art and Poetry

(from the book: Dead Behind The Eyes…The Awakening)

By Chuck Rienhardt

If you have ever known the worlds in my mind, 

my sympathy goes out to you, – for your troubles.

Madness is a demon that lives in a world of helpless need,

a thousand desires unanswered,  – a world without resolution.

Beyond the realms of death, 

I try to escape into me.

Torn fragments float through my mind, 

as I hold tight to my own sanity.

I feel like I’m lost within, 

as if I’ve drifted too far away.

What began in shadows and a dark distance, 

has drawn ever so close.

I thought this was a final nightmare before the end, 

my last vision of life before the abyss.

But I’m remembering memories that aren’t my own, 

I’m drowning within my soul.

You can take away these broken memories, 

but the visions never die.

There’s a simple path that I can see, 

and emptiness…Takes hold of me.

(from the book: Dead Behind The Eyes…The Awakening)

By Chuck Rienhardt

In the cage of your imagination blissfully immune to all this is really

dominating your deepest sleep…My nightmares you will feel.

I’m the echoes creeping through your dreams

Washed away by blood soaked screams

Down through the ages I’ve been called many things, 

but my true identity is something you could never comprehend.

Born into darkness by the silent suffering of unwanted souls, 

I am the child of a deadseed…And mankind is my prey.

I have fed on the defiled sacraments left upon blackened alters, 

and bathed in the rancid corps blood of Kings.

It is the sickly sweet stench of life that fills me with the need to hunt, 

and your humanity that draws me to you like flies upon rotting flesh.

When you’re alone in the liquid stillness of the night, 

I am the unseasonable chill that bleeds from the shadows.

The distorted visions behind your infected, bloodshot eyes, 

and like warts that grow upon leperous flesh I will feed upon your very soul.

Leaving you with ruins of insane dreams casting shadows of life you’ll never find,

Chaining you to a moment…Where nothing…Ceases to exist.

For it is far beyond the realms of death that lies a world of everlasting pain, 

and in your dreams I will take you there…For that is where I reign. 

(from the book “Dead Behind the Eyes…The Awakening”)

By Chuck Reinhardt

We have surely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities,

In an effort to comprehend and convey the human meaning of struggle and suffering.

I cannot see the future…And I cannot rewrite the past,

I´m lost within this struggle and it´s fading all too fast.

Hope is an illusion masking the reality of despair

This sacred truth I carry like a stone.

A secret, hidden from the eyes of man,

Like a stream of consciousness flowing into a river of blood.

Nightmares bring me face to face with versions of myself,

Some grotesque and distorted…others pure beings of light.

They speak in tongues not my own with companions unseen,

While sitting on a throne of clammy flesh…cast only by shadows.

“Find the gate and nudge it open”, they say, “What leaks out is yours to shape,

Open yourself to the entity that finds you and draw forth its power.

Consume of it as much as your body and soul are capable of containing,

But remember…when they body fails…the gate closes.”

But what seeps forth from this gate are many things, cold, hard, and unholy,

That hide in the deepest recesses of my mind…and watch.

No contemplation, no judgement, just icy, clinical observation,

Waiting for the precise moment…to slaughter…and feed upon my soul.

(from the book “Dead Behind the Eyes…The Awakening”)

By Chuck Reinhardt

Looking in the mirror,

At a stranger´s sullen face

I see a mask of sanity,

That´s slipping out of place.

I can see around the edges,

At all the twisted thoughts and dreams.

And hear the ringing in my ears,

Of softly spoken screams.

The softly spoken screams I hear,

Are only in my mind.

This I know…But still I turn,

And take a look behind.

Once again…there´s nothing there,

At least nothing I can see.

But this does not mean that they´re not real,

Screaming silently at me.

So I look back at the mirror,

And see a desperate, frightened face,

The slipping mask of Sanity,

Is gone…without a trace.

By Chuck Reinhardt

Dead behind the eyes…Deep into darkness I have awakened,

silently waiting for the rings of hell to be unsealed. 

Only then will the seeds of nothing begin to break through the soil,

as images that exist outside of time uprise as the demons of earth and air.

For out of the ground we were taken from the dust we are,

and to the ground we shall return as the dust we have become.

Blessed be this cursed ground that I walk upon,

for I walk on soil that nightmares are made of.

Imprisoned in a world of darkness,

just a shadow of the past cast forward in time, I move through me.

All these illusions are but reflections brought to life before my eyes,

of a corroding, chemical, wretched spawn of a beast that I see.

For centuries, I´ve traveled through the nine levels of damnation,

searching for flesh to taste upon my tongue.

For it is eternal the kiss I breathe as I siphon your blood to me,

I smell of death…I reek of hate…I warp reality.

Shrouded in sensation…bleeding from my eyes,

deception is my gift, to the cinobitz standing at my side.

Enticing it closer, from hunted to hunter I will rise,

for I am a demon…behind an angel´s disguise.

From the book  “Dead Behind the Eyes…the Awakening”

By Arizona Death Row Inmate Chuck Reinhardt

By Chuck Reinhardt

I could never begin to explain the complexities

Of the dimensions in which I live in.

But I attempt to separate substance from illusion, and in doing so,

I begin to feel at home in the echoing corridors of my mind.

I once glimpsed the man who occupied this fortress before his fall from sanity,

Stretched around his face was a mask of clever disguise.

Bitter things appeared and fled, dreams perhaps, or fragments from the past,

While a drool of bloody darkness spilled from his eyes.

So pure, so absolute, the hope of salvation in its depths,

More fragile than in any darkness I have ever seen.

His facial features began to run together like the slow melting of a wax max,

And the features of a hundred faces rose and fell like suppurating sores.

I watched, entranced by the way they grew and multiplied,

The world of his thoughts appearing and flickering before my eyes.

And just as suddenly, gone, were they all…only darkness,

As relentless as ever pressed upon me from all sides.

The sense I felt was as if I was trespassing here,

In a world hovering beyond or behind the façade of reality.

A stream of consciousness that one could never begin to understand,

Because no world could ever hope to compare with such sublime darkness.

By Chuck Reinhardt

At a time both brutal and bleak lingering between realms of reality,

I stood before an unopened door that reeked of sickness.

A presence seeped forth from the stench that lurked at the very fringes of perception,

Devoid of shape, starving for sustenance…I was no longer alone.

Chaotic memories filtered through my mind suspended on threads of mist,

Of an elaborately structured realm populated by entities known as “Shades”.

Bodiless souls consumed by hatred of heaven and hell,

A sickness breeding sickness…trapped between life and death.

Here all hesitation must be left behind…seek and ye shall find.

For I am the guardian of the gate…I am the eyes of death.

I am the stench feeding upon itself simmering beneath festering scabs, I don´t belong to this world…this world belongs to me.

Do you not understand what is coming? Nor what I do for you?

I am the Shade…set free to bring wrath upon all mankind.

I am your resurrection, your abomination, your path to salvation,

You, who have been forsaken by destiny…I will remove your skin.

O, willful ignoranto, do you see the future?

Do you not grasp the splendor of my creation? The necessity?

Judge NOT…lest you be judged yourself!

From the book – “Dead Behind the eyes…The Awakening”

By Arizona Death Row Inmate: Chuck Rienhardt.

By Chuck Reinhardt

I wake and hear something crawl under the door.

I watch – as if dreaming – as it crosses the floor.

The coldness it brings chills me clear to the bone,

What´s left of my soul…has finally come home.

With its hideous face and sulfurous smell,

The thing slithers back from its trip down to hell.

It screams to me things I cannot understand,

I scream at it back, “I´m only a man!”

I look in the mirror and all that I see,

Is a thing with no skin staring straight back at me.

Confusion and fear are at war in my mind,

As I look over my shoulder and see nothing´s behind.

Now my constant companion wherever I go,

This thing with no skin will not leave me alone.

In every reflection it´s all that I see,

A skinless perversion of what was once me.

It´s alive – but not living – in a bottomless well,

And I´m dead – but not dying – in this desolate cell.

This isn´t the end, only the start,

Together forever…*till death do us part.

By Chuck Reinhardt

Someone opened a door in my mind,

To a place where time itself dissolves into confusion.

Even in my desperation…I walked as cold as a ghost,

Doomed to repeat a lifetime´s path of failures.

When I came across a man standing before me,

He wore violence like a fur cloak riding his shoulders.

His cult was written in spilled blood,

Disfigurement and the virtue of destruction.

His black pitted eyeholes haunted me,

While speaking to me in eloquent silence.

“I am death” they said “I am your fate,

And the fate of all living things…I am what is left behind.

Today I am this man, tomorrow I am another

See the truth of me…not one is tethered.

I am bound to no single self,

But unleashed to a multitude of selves.”

Only then did I recognize this man standing before me,

For it was me that I refused to see,

Standing so self-possessed and content,

Inside my own inner world´s visions.

From the Book: “Dead Behind the Eyes…the Awakening”

By Chuck Reinhardt

The past is not simply the past,

But a prism through which the subject

Filters his own changing self-image.

Hiding the purity that flows from the roots in which we rose.

We long for the possibilities of the impossible existence,

To create the fabric and destiny of all mankind.

But what we are left with is a corrupt system feeding off itself,

Reality is distorted when your force fed your mind.

I am dying, but self-righteous to the end,

A lynchpin…war within…a means to my end.

To be reborn of a demon sky, purgatory unleashed,

And angel of genocide with stitches sewn in my eyes.

Like an exotic beast of human nature,

This god that you worship…the demon I breathe.

Together we are a cult of chaos…flesh adorned with thorns,

Bleeding tears of hatred and pain.

Can´t you see that we are one…

You can´t tear us apart. NO, you can´t tear us apart!

From the Book: “Dead Behind the Eyes…the Awakening

Hi. My name is Chuck Reinhardt and I am an Arizona Death Row inmate.  All the artwork and poetry you have seen and read come from the book “Dead Behind the Eyes…the Awakening”.   This is an unpublished book that I have written and illustrated including the cover in which you see.  Hopefully you are a publisher and want to help me give this kickass book to the world. I´m sitting here in this cage waiting to hear from all of you. Have a good one today.

Respect Always,

Chuck