Simple

 Being inclined to the over active mind 

makes you vulnerable

in ways unimaginable

to folk who’ve never been waifs or strays.

Every step on the back foot, 

drawing predatory thoughts and hungry looks

to scurrying attempts at connection.

This world seems so simple,

to those who find it simple.

The stacked deck favours the dealer.

Beg, borrow, steal 

mimic, mask. Never reveal

the hollow homunculus you feel,

or worse! Intensely solipsistic;

the only real person in a sea holographic

and loneliness becomes it's own sad satisfaction.

A “rebellion is better than tears” reaction

that eats at your happiness and interactions

until you're accustomed to numb.

You watch others’ battles won,

disaffected, trying to work out how it's done

or at least avoid pitfalls in the future.

And with time an illusory feature 

of other people's lives, who can plan anyway?

Why strive to do more than survive

when that's all you can manage most days?

And that's pushing it.

The path out of the shit is too well disguised

and buried behind the sharks’ smiling lies.

Societal standards seem illogically unwise

and they play the games with loaded dice

and rules they won't explain.

Every minute gain is minimised

by mistaken intentions. Subtle knives

and not so subtle, wasted time 

of trauma born. Mistrustful eyes

turn away from the world.

and back to the half life of disconnection.

That way is safer.

This world is simple

to those who find it simple.

By all means, take advantage of your advantages,

but notice the disadvantaged are taken advantage of

by systems they can't get a purchase on,

and people they dared to rely upon.

And every dismissive assumption you hold

in hands that have never been burned by the cold

is a nail on the bed you told

 us we made on our own.

So we'd better lie in it.

I'm not buying it.

This dance of the butterflies 

is so despised despite it's beauty.

Our average age on day of death is only 12 plus 40.

Disparities so distant instances of juxtaposition jarr intensely out of rhythm and with lyrical precision present suffering as noble when it's not.

It's not.

Applauding us for overcoming obstacles you placed

as if adjudicators in some Ninja Warrior race

feels disingenuous at best.

Gladiators, ready?!

Potential lost is our Roman empire.

No one here dreams of paradise.

This world is simple

 to those who find it simple.

Not the ones you label simple.

They're the most complex of all.

Witness

I am swallowed by my bitterness

and I swallow it

in this fractal frame of failed relationships.

Cynicism soothes my wounded seat on shelf.

I can’t stand going out.

I’d rather sit here by myself.

I’m past all the politics,

all the pitifully petty pecks of poison.

I’ve destroyed some neural pathways -

traumatic mistakes in my past days -

I’m taking small steps to start to fix them.

Small steps are fine, but small talk is a human affliction.

Fill the air with comforting fiction:

soulless banality hosed down and repeated as wisdom

by those who love to speak but have never learned to listen;

giving advice even they don’t believe in.

It’s deceiving

telling everyone you’re

Fine

all the time. It’s not

Honest.

Holding back - substitution of feelings in place of facts.

Illogical reasoning misleads and distracts.

Choreographed outward expression to avoid exposing inner lack

of belonging.

This wrongling has always felt that gap.

When I started reading Phillip K Dick

I felt seen. Something in me clicked and it all made sense.

Let’s just say, for argument’s,

that you understand

how it feels to live life as a grain of sand.

Watch unreactive distracted citizenry

wail and gnash and wring their hands;

apathetically prophetic taking knees 

instead of making stands.

Trembling. Waiting for breath.

And when it comes, the hurricane howl ignites the spite that underlies society.

Sparks to the skies, and hang sobriety!

Times of extremes clouding clarity of conviction.

If we’re all victims, 

Then surely we’re all, too, perpetrators.

Ears filled with these half-baked statements of journalistic tinnitus

pushing the same old them-and-us.

Propaganda pervasive; twas ever thus.

Psychological soundbites and deep cuts.

And as above, so below. 

On a personal level, it’s starting to show.

Look among you! Do you even know

how many are masking? How many know?

For all of the feeling that’s public displayed

how little is shown when the mind’s whirr is stayed?

This adrenaline engine is seemingly binary:

tectonic plate movement rate

or warp times infinity.

Where is the nuance? Where the gradations?

Where are the plateaus and smooth undulations?

Youth speaks in infinites, we speak in finalities.

Counting up daily accounts 

of fatalities.

Powerless but to bear witness 

to all of it.