Always been told
That we are not machines
Yet, our world is built like this:
Routine, repair
Relinquish, revere
All fact no speculation
We must continue
But really, do we?
Here is the summation:
Becoming victims of liquidation
Just by going on vacation
Choosing vocations
Just to chase stagnation
Chasing relations to find salvation
Just to receive probation and isolation
Mutations of liberation
Lasting for long durations
We are machines, observe our foundation
Full of mutation, renovation
Life is a sacred thing
Yet, look at the pain we bring

Lone in peace, but you
Surrounded by the sorrow
Of strange personas

Beautiful technology
Dividing our diverse psychology
Are we human if we can't do anything without it?
But how could it stop?
Corporations feel elation
Once the profit lines exceed expectation
No aspiration, only calculation
Cashing in on our passion
Refashioned to distant compassion

Want vs. have
I want to do this
So I go to chose it
But when I have to do this
It makes me lose it
Freedom never freed him
Why even pretend?
Our life ends once we fend
Individuality turned to superficiality
Fighting for life, common mentality
Why is it easier to die under lax legality?
Wanting to have a choice
No matter the side
Choice is never supplied

If I disappeared, would life be the same?
Would I have fame?
Would I be maimed?
Would people be ashamed
Of the signs they chose to not see?
Lighting my heart aflame
All I see are red flames
Filled with anger
From being lame
Life is a game
One that I want someone else to claim

Depreciation
Inevitability
Appreciation

Grounding and bounding
Fear of being one thing brings
Inadequacy

As I get older, things get grosser
Called for a grown-up but I never showed up
Fear for the future
That I can no longer change
Anger for the present
Bowing to overlords for simple accords
Sorrow for the past
That I wish could have lasted
Joy becomes inverse
Now all I beg for is a reverse
Life is a gift until it becomes a curse
My existence itself is adverse
I do not want to become a role to rehearse
I want to be free, I want to converse
No chance to reimburse my debt to the universe
But as I get older, things only get worse
As I get older, death becomes closer
Maybe then, my pain will disperse
For I am the one who will write my final verse

Living through illusions
Becoming disillusioned
Leading to exclusion
Delusions and confusion
Packaging hope into an infusion
Marketed as inclusion
Executed as intrusion
Running into seclusion
Transfusion, hypoxia to asphyxia
Left with no ideas except extrusion

One way, one sole fate
Caterwaul against the fall
Torn down testament

Parasites of peace
Thrive on conflict, past turmoil
Modern banal spoils

Always moving
Nothing is fixed
Everything is a risk
Is this why nothing feels like home?
Roaming or trapped in domes
Feeling alienated, call it a syndrome
Caring about chrome more than the biome
Hollow, made of styrofoam
Never improving
Always moving

Poisoning the well
Questions are flung, words that stung
As our flask withdraws

Glimmer and glamour
Grey buildings with vacant eyes
Advertised to buy

Mimes, clowns in disguise
Reality, no surprise
Dictated by deceit

Corruption is a perspective
Held by the collective
Their effort to remain remains protective
Their intentions stay clear, reflective
Guided in life by a retrospective
After all, it is cost-effective

Poor? Too lazy.
Rich? Too selfish.
Stable? Too adverse.
We cannot come together
Kumbaya?
Not with humanity's perpetual
Coup d'état

Praying for heaven
Cause you live in hell
Life is cyclical, one step until purgatory
Cynical but real
No ideals left to heal
For our love remains blocked
By artificial stopgaps
With no intersection
I can muse on the use of our ruse
For that is all I can do

Lone hands, unbroken
Pebbles with no impact, yet
Boulders break thresholds

All these thoughts pirouette
Spinning merry-go-round
With no merry to go around
How could I be happy when
We are all slaves to fixation
Sensations with no liberation
Across the nation
Taxation and stagnation
A sickness with a correlation
No navigation for our permutation
Mutated faces, all an affectation
Annihilation, assassination
Our own worlds built for encapsulation
Polarization, exaggeration
Visualizations of victimization
We sit back and lose preservation
My happiness is no obligation
Just a replication of past elation
Hollow aspirations
Built by alienation

Sun's explosion
Earth's implosion
Countdown timer
Paints a grim reminder
As the cost rises
The tide follows
Burnt out from life
Burnt by the sky
Connection, regression
Isolation's new weapon
Dying young in the past
Living old in the future
One person deciding lives
One hundred needed to suture

We all have a canvas
Let me describe the pieces:
For one it was stolen
One it was broken
One had a heart
I asked if it was for her
Or for those who saw it
One had a crown
On a king most reprehensible
One had a faded landscape
It was how he saw the world
Or what he wanted to make it
One had a dream
But I didn't have the heart to say
That I could never see it
One had a fiend
They called it a "self-portrait"
One was blank
They were afraid to be one thing
Reduced to an exaggeration
One had an old man
Clinging to past days
With a love free from sorrow

Sea to sea, thousands
Crying for answers, problems
Ubiquitous stress

What was good
Now turns bad
Time ticks forward
Always comes back
Forward it rocks
Backwards it crashes
Skin is showing
Clothes are closing
Ideal portrayals
Revealing realistic fails
Physical health
Mental wealth
Culture war
Financial repression
Change for progression
Change for regression
Change to compression
The cracks are showing
Yet life keeps going
Seeds are sowing
But no water is flowing

Abhor or adore
Evermore, nevermore, you
Answer for our war

Crowns and crests disguise
Devils with painted faces
Authority, hate

Two answers
Extinction or reason
Harsh distinction
Humanity's treason
Are our lives unique
Among hundreds and billions?
Why do we control nature
By separating ourselves?
Endless, friendless
Evolving to get less
Age is no refinement
Inside is misalignment
Questions not solved by assignments
We live through confinement
Enhancers of cancer
Dancers and prancers
Funds without a financer

Aged, unstable
Closed fists, old distant answers
Open hands replaced

True lies bring no pride
As our world runs dry, revised
Assisted by lies

I'll get a life
Where can I find one?
I've chased a dream spun by folly
Fate is not cruel, it is my own psychology
A soul cannot be satisfied by numbers
For those at the summit
Jump off to the base
Peak to perish, garish to cherish
Consecutively nightmarish
What face do I perceive?
Is this really me?
Caught up in the feckless and reckless
Ignoring all the life
I have wasted over time
Was my time truly mine?
Or am I a slave to bloodlines and deadlines?

Decaying, degrading
We take all for granted
Never giving ourselves time
To enjoy what we have
Our clocks are set to different times
If you never got the memo
Metronomes tick at different tempos
So when our time comes to close
We turn it back to avoid letting go

Living in boxes
Offering a view
Of freedom
Modern mirages
Life was never free
Free to work
Enslaved to life
In our world
There are no enemies
Who do we fight to unlink our chains?
Our war? My war? Their war?
Across the land, over the hills, under the caverns
All a reminder:
All our problems originated with us
We are the real enemy
Now tell me what have I missed?
Was this world always like this?

Your smile
Teeth clenched with no joy
Coping, hoping for a boy
Not once or twice, third's the time
One boy, one world
Beautiful horizons
Strength gets wizened
I look back, and I get the message
Receiving pain in vain
Hollow sorrow
Fear of what is near
You see smiles
I see venom behind bones
Never turn back
Knives get thrown
I knew I was hurt
Now it's ingrained, deranged, unchanged

Like a star
Shining brighter than all
Correlation to constellations
Together forever
Until the years burn into ashes
Dusted and thrusted away
Into a memory
Like a star
Fading and passing
But never quite going out
Even as it dies
No one will ever quite forget it all
So when I wake up
Will you still be there for me?
I want to shine like you
But all I can do is pretend
Yet it makes people smile
I shine so brightly
To call out to you
I hope that you see
The brightness of this world
Maybe I really can be like a star

Broken, battered
Split, shattered
I don't feel like I'm here
I'm not even there, so, where?
All in our own world
Foundation of isolation
Decayed and decadent
Holding onto the remnants
Life is a cycle
My conscious is a rival
I don't want to live through survival
I'm barely living
I ring the door to sound my arrival
I need a revival
One arm pulls, one arm pushes
I have fallen for my own excuses

The sun shines bright
My eyes shine like copper
The birds sing
But they sound like cries
People sit on the grass
But their faces run dry
Sunglasses and sun
To reject the projection
This world is a beauty
Our world is a beast
I would go outside
But my feet are tired of falsity

Trapped between bars
Entwined in steel and ideals
I push them aside
A delusional illusion
Turned to dust, I descend
Toward the entrance, I rescind
This cycle of prison and pain
Will become an oasis
Yet standing before me
The warden draws near
Just a puppet, a proxy
Past your prime, no moxie
I stand tall, I send my fist as a message
But before it connects, my eyes awaken
It's me...
It's me?
It's me.

My heart feels dissonant
Cognition is not innocent
Dissent, can no longer repent
Words are fluff that fills in actions
But my motives are repressed, under duress
Mediator between mind and soul
Why can I not dig out of this hole?
Maybe my goal comes with no flow
For a lack of growth fuels slack and ropes
Binded in tightness, blinded by brightness
Intuition guides, reason lags behind

I feel old, I feel young
I feel energetic, I feel lethargic
I feel close, I feel distant
I feel everything, I feel nothing
I feel dead, I feel alive
I feel defeated, I feel succeeded
I feel alone, I feel known
I feel broken, I feel whole
I feel love, I feel scorn
I feel myself, I feel you
I feel for me, I feel for you
I feel your pain, let's help it too

I've returned home
Yet it feels so lone
Tonight it feels desolate, alienation
But it always felt safe, secluded, selective
Have I changed too much?
Have I changed just a little?
Has my nostalgia been convicted, begging for an acquittal?
My mind is stuck, my heart is struck
Rabbits chased each other, running for hours
I want to run with the rabbits, but, for how far?
Maybe they grew, beyond me and you
I want to grow, but my home is no more
Being independent is not a life that's splendid
Why should I grow if it just means I'll be alone?

When everything is a war
Does it lose the meaning of actions?
Satisfaction at the cost of reaction
Bleak and tragic
Our history comes with no magic
For we will always make factions
The cost of our freedom
Is that we **** and delete them
The other, the bother, the estranged brother
You're not fighting to be free
You'd be free if you were able to disagree

Everyone has a voice
But now it's time to stand down
Oversaturation
Brings all of your points down
If you step to the plate
No one cares if you bunt
We like the extraordinary, the home runs
Look at what we read to be real
We kneel, we keel, we don't know how to see
So many problems cause we try to be beyond real
Stressed at our best cause no one lets us rest
Numb to the world from a lack of control
Defensive, but always on the attack
It's not a competition when it's rigged for the best
None of this is at your behest
It's off my chest
I wash my hands and pretend I'm absolved
For I've never felt human
So look around, can you blame me now?
All we do is use work to find the meaning of strife
But how do we live when we pass life by?

I'm sick of being passive
It's time for aggression
You said that you'd embody innovation
Screamed out to the nation
Then you crawl back to classic manipulation
This whole **** race is last place
Families who can't afford a place
Dinner with no steaks
Every day, more at stake
The tension, the pressure, the hybrid of humanity
Such a **** tragedy
AI is more human than thee
Deplorable, unforgivable
Creating more because excess drowns the war
Chained to ties, bound to lies
We talk about headlines
While the cause remains inside
Pull it from the roots, shake the whole system
I knew we were ignorant
But how did we get this dumb?

I feel like a fool
Magicians make me drool
The priestess, so pristine
Caught in the embrace of an empress
What of an emperor without an empire?
Empirical affairs, embracing tradition
Hierophant to the lovers
Carried by a chariot
Silent strength of a hermit
Bending minds to spin the wheel of fortune
Bring forth justice to the hanged man
End of an old age, born anew
Death is a chance meeting with temperance
Strung by the devil in his tower
High atop, hoping to reach the stars
As the moon elicits peace, the sun burns him out
Judged for the world to see
Now, my life is exhausted

The armor is raised
As I absorb the sun's rays
No cracks will crumble
No stabs will suffice
I shall live and die
Stuck in the knight's abstract mind
Pieces fall
Just to build new ones
Even on the surface
Iron maiden guards the heart
Can't guide my mind
When the neurons decide
That the world was not made for you
Now I sit and stare
Man of tin and sin
Whispers, all I hear:
I will never leave you

Self-reflection
Drives course correction
Why limit to the old and grey?
They have less time to change
We have one life
Irrespective of all drives
Bring no pain to others
Some people have a dream
But will they ever go to it?
Can you fulfill something if it exists in jest?
Time versus success, why are our skills discussed?
I wish I knew the answers
I wish that I could help you
But I was born into the world
I never helped form you

Carving a path
Pushing forward
My head is down
Blind to all the sorrow
As a drill, I can't stop now
I'm digging further
With a 2-inch shovel
By the time I change the world
It will become yours
Broken, battered
I'll ignore the signs
As long as you can be with me

Silence
Created from a lack of noise
Reminding me
Of everything that speaks to me
Anywhere but here
Maybe midnight will give me the will
To scream
Not for me
For those I lost, stand in front of me
Please, oh please
In a better world, you would be here
I wonder how many said these same things?

A man wanders
His dreams are squandered
Now the isolation
Begins to peer through
The glass inside
His heart made of tubes
Such a foolish man
Tried to select his world
He tried to be so brave
Now he lays depraved
Deprived of a life
No emotions inside
All that's left deep inside
Acid and cyanide
Pessimistic tendencies
Side effects of the world you see
Marvels cannot bring him glee
For one and all, the world to see
The tears he shed
Engrained in the sea

Hopeful tones
Splattered on the walls
I see the bells
Yet I hear no sound
At the top, I stand
Hearing no one
At the bottom, I crawl
Hearing everyone
In the middle, I kneel
I can hear the top
I can hear them now
But now all I know
Will be ****** out
By the time I stand
All the love will come out
Until what remains
Becomes lies, never found
Now, here I am
Hear me now
Before I get pushed to the back
Until I bow
Here I am now, here I am now
No matter the height I jump
I'll always be afraid
Of the here and now