"Don't wait for Gandalf to show up on your doorstep to have an adventure.
Be Gandalf and do it for yourself."

Mozart,
deaf,
died, eventually.

Picasso, pervert, died; Whitney, Winehouse, drugs, dead; Elvis, Methamphetamine, died

(on the toilet).

Van Gogh,
missing an earlobe,
died.

Plath,
head in an oven,
in front of her kids,
Woolf
Patron saint of insanity, I guess
waded into a river and-

River. River Phoenix. Drugs.

Natalie Merchant wrote that song about him in 1995.

Flash forward.
Me, twenty-one, drunk.
Proprietor of a collection of lackluster poems.
Sold their small, nonbinary soul to the Devil
in exchange for a fortune,
gone.

Your pride
comes from
your nationalism,
your patriotism,
rage and dissatisfaction.
You pass each moment
stewing, colluding
with each new oppressor  
in the name of solidarity

Spewing slogans and
other simple statements
oaths and weak ideas
you build a fascist nation
and wonder how you ever got here.