I've never felt more than half an hour:
Insomnia trickles down until the black-tar-ridden-sap oozes onto
My partially open eyes.
And, to say I've never been in love.
Emotions rise up and retreat-
A constant heaving of the battered
Chest- saving us from finding out
How frightening life is.

Murmuring our sordid laments to Lady Death,
Beneath the murky glow of hotel room bed sheets
And fluorescent dollar store night lights,
Too vacant to summon anything more than a whimper
From our submissive minds.

Nothing ends, here.
One upon another, words flow effortlessly
Out of our cavernous mouths,
Clogging our chests with empty syllables until
We forget why we ever tried to do something more
Than care.

Depression can be felt anywhere-
The air slowly seeps from the hissing
Caracas of a worn out tire,
Or the lungs of anyone
Still enough to remember.
Mindlessly chanting Hail Mary's,
We taunt time with our penchant for immortality
And hospital lobby greeting cards,
Until Aphrodite descends to sell her soul
To the highest bidder.

Mother, I have killed the world
With a time bomb that will never detonate:
Ceaselessly ticking on and on-
A reliant backdrop for something
Too harsh to exist in silence.

Our hearts have fallen from our sleeves
And into films, romance novels,
And 3am cooking infomercials.
Land of the living:
The walking dead,
The too-afraid-to-tell-you-how-I-really-feel,
The product of a broken people
Who traded silence
For a language full of mixed intention.

Children of the night,
Blindly parade around before noon,
Trying to buy redemption
At a corner store market
For half the price
Of the pulpit.

Afraid of hearing the latent echo of
Our own pulsing hearts,
We fill our lives with white noise
And intimacy, too stagnant
To exist without our 3am spirituals.
Anxiously arranging our feeble lives
Around minutes and hours-
Slaves to false agendas,
We battle the dark, secretly,
until soon
We lose sight of the purpose
And get caught up in the motion
Of a world too drugged out on
Redemption
That we forget our own names.