The water tries
to spell happy
my brain yells
                              **** that

row up the stream
God it’s all so
                             blue!
wait no
It’s nothing
cause it's all breaths
of tiny explosions
and everybody
                               dies!

just pixel cells and carbon
or some **** like that

a great green north
shouting hymns
to quite a rumbling mind
but all the quite is too much sound
the beautiful green trees and little
                                                        blue ponds!

make the sounds
click
postcard
paint it on my
face

hey
I’m happy!
                             wait
                          no
rustles of wind
are just the gas chambers
hissing on

those two oxygen
*****
are professional arsonist
wearing mask that say
                                           fertilizer
                                                    salesman
you breath in life
I burn inside
out
millimeter by millimeter
until a tree grows out of my
head

we all die
but what if we
                         don’t
It’s all real till it’s
                               synthesized
I'm symphonies inferno
until I'm part of the choir

looking around looking in
through eyes cast left searching
my serpentine luxury has
envenomed my origin
when in me you find only proxy
look to digitized surrogates
starring back be only the husk
simply faded synapse a broken discord

we've aligned the margins
counted the drops
standardized the primal
resolved to the order are we
what docile agents we've become
servants to our own magistrate
who euthanize our inhibitions
freedom can't live in this ritual
freedom can't survive ordinance

I killed my own dreams for
I can't find free from these prosaic walls
hey hey I forgot how to imagine

We read tragedies to cast shadows on our fingers until we pull our hands away and realize they're stained black.
Our impartial grief resolves by tucking the stories in the shelf and taking a shower.
We scrub away another world's trauma from our wrist, browse Netflix for something happier, and go to bed at 10.

Tomorrow we will reach out for handshakes to display their firmness and how it's all a hoax.
See we're stronger than the others. We don't lie in graves, we scrawl marks on a concrete wall and say they would have died regardless.

We reach out for handshakes and tell you it's inconsequential.
But your arm tremors from holding tragedies woven through your lips, and your hand shakes as it grasps at strings holding your house together.

We reach out for handshakes and cry freedom.
While you read tragedies scribed under your skin.
They wrench under layers of sinew, twisting your nerve endings into a lump at the base of your skull so big I can play tennis with it.

We reach out for handshakes and tell you grandma was old anyway.
You breath in tragedies and hope the heart beating in your ****** can scrub it off.
You bleed tragedies on a hospital bed and wait for a transplant that matches.

We reach out for handshakes and tell you you're not choking
You clutch at the tragedies swallowing your lungs and tell us to let go of the plug.

my daughter is almost 5
and my son is nearly 2
I could simply say they're one and four
but when the number's higher it sounds a little better
they're less babies and more childlike
you know, bigger and more wise
I'm more wise

my daughter is almost five
and my son is nearly two
they're in our yard with twig berrets
and mud stained smiles posing for a postcard to make the hose drinking generation proud.
he straddles the ground, chest bare like he's Tarzan and howls at the blue sky
challenging the sun

I look at him like he's made of stone
she's a daisy pedal I crush in my hand and compress into a diamond
the toxins dripping from the curling edges of my lips burn the dirt from her face
the shine of the light washes out the blood on my knuckles.
a ring on my finger and my hands look clean

my daughter is almost five
and my son is nearly two
their muddy fingers comb their feral hair
and their green feet clip the grass till they find jagged rocks
they weep over skinned kneecaps and with one arm I pull her close
with the other I slug his shoulder, "buck up kiddo, you'll be alright"
I hold a stone in each hand, and call one a precious gem while I build my house out of the other

my skin has washed against those stones since they were none and none
built into the houses of a thousand graveyards I've watched daisies pile over golden sarcophaguses
watched them wilt at the bottom of alters built on stone
I won't carve epitaphs into these hearts I hold

my daughter is almost five
and my son is nearly two
we drag fallen branches to our firepit and dance to music next to the flames
like weightless stone his strength surges to his tippytoes
she powders his nose with ash and pretends she's a cheetah
her game isn't to **** she just wants to chase
princes have their feet welded to pedestals and the sport's no fun for her

my children aren't rocks, they're stardust
I won't make kings or queens I've no providence  over their future
so I'll **** the venom from the sky and watch them walk back to the stars
I may not be a champion but I'll be their father