I passed a drifter sitting on the edge
Of the I-49 on-ramp
As he gave me a fleeting glance
With his thumb up-stretched.
Then I passed a driverless car
On the highway's shoulder,
Dented and sun-bleached,
Whose owner is probably sitting in a cell.

Every commuter and traveller:
We all pass these stranded souls
And remnants on our way to wherever,
Without a second thought.
The shredded tires and shattered bumpers;
Skid marks as a testament.
They might as well not exist.

Just last night I read about some woman
Seen on a security camera in New York --
Eating a burger, of all things --
Witnessing a car plow into three people on a sidewalk
Across the street from her.
She turned around, walked off.
Two people died in that moment.

It makes me think about those charity commercials
Of starving children that no one likes to watch,
And how the marketing team thought
Those desperate scenes might inspire
Someone to help.
But, even when tragedy is right next to someone,
They seem to go about their business:
Business as usual.

We have left ourselves alone,
And alone we decay.

By: Forrest Jorgensen ©

thirty-five years
since Mark gunned you down
thirty-five years, passed
like a long sleepless night
that ends with taunting morning light
no brilliant sunrise grandly pronouncing
a glorious new dawn of man
although that would have been your plan
with your entreaties to give peace a chance
and imagine, imagine, imagine

now I kneel in this rain gray park
like a reject from some holy ark
a pilgrim in doleful disappointed pose
after seeing what your earthly brothers chose
was not to imagine a world of peace and love
but to wear reality like a cast iron glove
making mockery of your martyred chants
proceeding like a billion scurrying ants
deaf to your childlike pleas

across the soaked soil where your ashes lay
yesterday and today…and tomorrow
I feel the soggy sorrow
that you would have felt
if you could still see
all the rage of humanity

Disappointments, like mistakes, are a painful but important part of the learning process.

Social cues are common,
and should be hard to miss.
I find that social cues are oft -
hang on a second, I gotta take a ****.
* * *
What was I saying? Oh, right.
Social cues are awkward,
but I grew up in a weird environment.

It's times like these that I wish you were still around.
I could use somebody to keep me from sleeping on the ground.

Your worry spoke volumes,
but I've since grown deaf.

You were caught up in living.
I'm hung up on death.

Surrounded on all sides by the sudden prospect of doom.
He attempted to create some more room between what life he had left and an imminent death.

"Time flies when you're having fun,"
so isn't the opposite true?

How many eons did he spend doing things he hated?
How many lifetimes he must of lived through;
loathing his dreary circumstances,
his hobbies,
his friends.

Surrounded himself with dullness in order to blunt the passage of time.

I mean, in that situation,
what would you do?

He forewent all sense of pleasure for the sake of a longer life,
but in the end,
he lost it too.

In truth, it's my go-to state.
I'll say it's not so bad when I actually mean that it's great.
Litotes and understatement -
that's my forte.

If I ever make the mistake of letting you get too close,
I'll soon compensate by pushing you far, far away.

To do it clearly,
it'd take a book.
I'm not up for that kind of work,
so I'll attempt to cut it short.

You are but a part of a convoluted mix up.
A constant element in a periodic table of personal madness.
An important ingredient in the recipe of death and rebirth.
The other side of a mirror I'd gaze into in order to gauge my self worth.

Too vague.
I'm getting nowhere with this.
Let me try to put it into simpler words:

Identity crisis.
Bad acid trip.
Social experiment gone horribly wrong.
An attempt to live my life in accordance to the lyrics of a song.
180 degree turnabout of my own strengths and flaws.
Less weight for what I felt and more placed in what I saw.

You are just a part of my deepest plunge into what I thought it was to be insane.

This is far from enough,
and it's surely a mess,
but it's so hard to explain.

It’s odd sitting here with the
consistency of the toxicity
flowing through my veins,
the consecutive order is
fuelling the regularity to my brain,
every negative thought weaved
through sobriety surfaced through
every lie t