If you've the gumption
you can watch the soul
burn right outta me.
Any minute now it'll
hit the ground in
a smoking heap.
You can marvel as my sails
deflate and gasp, the scandal,
as all my dreams crash
to earth like space debris.
We're not looking through
rose colored shades
we're here to talk on
the whole uphill thing.
I don't know if it's left
the station or not
but I don't see even
dim light down the line
and I've been at this
platform for ages
waiting on a train
don't come.
I was made in the image
of failure and loaded to
the brim with potential
without drive.
Cast out into a world
with nothing,
told about plenty
and mocked as I struggle
to survive.
I am the king, lord over
all I see, of having just
enough rope to dangle
like a possibility above
an ocean of
try hard dissimive noises.
Metaphor pushed here
beyond the breaking point.
It's hard to describe
with words
but it was painted
in violence clear enough
for me to understand.
Without pressure gasoline
goes stale, left in cans
in the garage until it's
only usable in the lawn mower.
Online influencer culture
leaves me cold,
television shows are barely
on TV anymore
and the lives of friends
and family are curated for
timeline efficiency to the
point of unbelievablity.
No one posts about the fight
or the bad vacation.
No one admits that their
kid says a lot of real unwise ****, too.
Cursed with lackluster
millennial ambition I now find,
nearing forty,
myself in compition with
Instagram accounts of people
I have known for years
but never see and
I hate it.
At least from the bottom
of the well you can
see the sky,
at least from nothing
one can still hope
to climb.
The final embers of my
soul are dying out
growing cold at my feet
where they fell
and I wish I could say
they burnt like a
funeral pyre throwing
light into the starless
night sky and warmth
like a blanket across
the world around me
but I'm cold and it's
been dark a very long
time and the train
has yet to arrive.