Sitting alone day by day
Feelings of hope slipping away
Anxiety knocking on the door
Depression bringing me down to the floor

"Everything will be fine, no need to worry now"
I hear everyday with reasonable doubt
They see my pain and notice it too
As I sit in the corner of the room

People never care
And then they dont know why
Why some of peoples biggest wishes are to die

so what if I'm a little tired
so what if I'm a little stressed
every day I keep on pushing through
or at least I try my best

okay maybe I don't eat enough
and it's kinda bad for my health
but technically
that doesn't mean
that I need professional help

because I'm ok
it may not seem like it
but I'm ok
I'm not a little kid

I don't need you to kiss my hurt
& try to make it go away
everyone knows that doesn't work
at least… not for me anyway...

When I was five,
my mother told me I was loved.
Years later, she asked me to leave because
I was the reminder of the gruesome past that haunted her.

When I was ten,
my father told me he believed in me.
Years later, he refused to accompany me because
I was an embarrassment to him in front of the society.

When I was fifteen,
my friends told me I was funny.
Years later, they all laughed at me because
I was the gullible teenager who fell for their flawless façade.

When I was twenty,
this guy said I was beautiful.
Years later, he trashed me, tormented me because
I was ignorant enough to overlook my inevitable flaws.

So, sorry for not believing in you,
for questioning your intentions, inclusively, in-depth
when you told me you loved me because
I didn’t want to wind up years later,
learning it the hard way that people often don’t mean what they say.

This one, signed as myself and not my pen name, is a new step for me, I've never really put myself into my work, but this one is all me. Thus, it is called:
.

BARED SOUL

Life moves on
and things become too real.
A wife. Kids. Career.
It’s too much, I want to run away.

Everything has changed with
my position in the world.
I’ve never fit in
Always the freak who knows no limits,
the one who sits alone and minds his own.

Never understood, never accepted.
Now a husband, a dad, still the same.
Always covering up myself; hiding
behind wit and cruelty.

A shield to disappear into,
Afraid to be me; to send up alone.
I used to know who I was but
now I’m not so sure.

It seems I have my life sorted out,
but am I really happy?

A question I always find myself asking
but can never answer.
I don’t think anyone knows the meaning of happiness,
or if it really exists.

Tonight I found myself holding her close,
and as I rested my head on her chest,
I quietly try not to cry.

It’s hard sometimes to keep it all in,
to hold strong so as not to lose myself,
it’s why I write as I do.

An outlet through a pen is all I have,
only the page wont judge,
won’t declare me a freak,
won’t know that something is wrong with me.

The thoughts I have,
my inability to empathize with other’s pain and loss.
It makes me wonder if I’m right for this world.

I’ve been to two funerals,
one I barely knew, the other I held dear.
And lost a grandfather who meant everything,
yet I never shed a tear.

I used to think that it was because I am strong,
but now maybe that isn’t so.

Who am I really?
I think I need to know.

for

    once,

   i would

love

      to be

         the poem

and

     not

         the poet

New dose
switches on
around 2 pm.

My mind shrugs
off the shape
of the shadow.

Anxiety's buried
under confident
emerald obelisks.

The day is given
back to me,
engraved.

The slipping sun
is silver,
far away,

& the gloam
is a table
of wet glass.

The poem was inspired by a particular photo of the WT C, and after that by my first visit to the 9/11 Memorial.  On the day of 9/11, I was working about a diagonal mile away, and from our windows, we could see people jumping to their death.

Open sky annulled
to bordered lines of
uptown edges,
worldview momentarily
forcibly redefined by
memories of buildings and sadder days,
recollections of pillars of biblical smoke rising

A photograph
makes me look up,
and sit down historically,
need to catch a breath,
to rest mentally,
upon a storied small bridge's steps,
that I well recall,
a disappeared street stoop.
all were rubble then and once
upon that day.

Wear, tear, and older eyes distill perspective,
but the hardy heart is hardly stilled
by the recognizable gray upon
bon vivant gray reflective surfaces of
memories of buildings and sadder days

So today, on a reborn street,
I rest upon reconstituted speckled curbstone,
the city's lowered down ledges,
the city's lowered down-town boundaries,
constantly redrawn, but
nonetheless, always rebuilt from their own
regenerated stony compost,
and the NY passersby doesn't even notice
a man, head in hands,
silently weeping, thinking that:

We throw away so much we should have kept.
We keep so much we should have thrown away.

Lose keepsakes, but keep our mysterious sadnesses
locked away in compartments that open only to
benedictions uttered in ancient tongues.

Make your own list,
be your own curator,
catalogue visions of sophomoric triumphs,
museum mile pile
those early poetic drafts,
be unafraid of memories
raw and ungentrified,
overlaid, buried underneath
postmortem of dust-piles of senior critiques

Finally went downtown to see
where the blessed water falls
into catacomb pits that once
were the foundations
of buildings that ruled the cityscape,
downtown anchors
for a modern city that exists
only because it was built on
million year old granite bedrock

Stone monuments are stolid, discrete.
Memories are of grayed, frayed edge consistency.
Negatives resurrected that survive digitally,
all blend synthetically, layer upon layer,
essence distilled in a single,
black and white photograph
that serves to
disturb complacency,  
awaken stilled pain,
reflections suppressed,
are restored

I drowned my days in ample waste
A sense of doom — a sense of haste!

Engulfed my skin — possessed my bones
Replaced my voice with brittle tones