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.
