by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle

It began with a wail
“Bring the Hammer. Bring the Rage.”
And with a boom, smash,
A few cuts, bruises, burns, and scars,
We forged our lives

Together we were an alloy of absolute, disheveled chaos
A folded steel of unstoppable imperfections
Clean, because we knew how to get *****
Stronger, because of our magnificent flaws
Pure, because of our willingness to flaunt our impurities

Our emotions boiled to extremes
Represented as terrifying visages of paint, mud, blood, dye, and pieces of glass
Peppering our bodies as proof that we can feel
So real, so raw, so unlike the mundane, moderate identities we are forced to live
That no one passes without gawking in amazement and terror
Our mild manners are just masks for our superhuman madness

The rage comes and flows through us
Fills us
Finally with a conduit
An exit strategy
In the effigies of our commodified existence
They crack with the spider web of safety glass
Explode into splinters and shards
And trail across the sky in a dance of magnetic iron oxide

We are twisted and mangled and sick
Mangled into some image of another
Twisted in the rubber band tension just moments before it snaps
And sick of being told not to feel

We broke who we were to make who we will be
The endless shells of molds fractured
Shatters like our porcelain dreams
Their shards still present in our skin years later

We destroyed what held us back
Or held us in
The prisoners using their own shackles,
And bodies as weapons against their inanimate jailers

Like the flowers that bloom from the blood-soaked battlefield
Where the shattered pieces of glass become the strands of horse hair on an artist's brush,
Where the pigments of blood and paint are intertwined onto the canvas of a mad artist's carousel
of orchestrated mayhem.
The American Dream is a shattered amalgam of trading people for things
Experiences, for proof of them

We will clear away the rubble of ourselves
Move away from the pieces that hold us back
And forge ahead with the fury of an exploding gas tank

When the sun goes down
And the flames go up
We will finally break
The last dismantled icon of glass, plastic, electrons, and lies
This will be an end
There will be no more funeral processions
No more grave markers
We mourn our lives no longer
There will only be rebirth
A beautiful emotional breakdown
Where rage finally gives way to hope
Witness the fall of a man
A property, a thing
This will be our legacy of beautiful destruction
One last time
Then we will pick up the pieces
And build the rest of our lives