As I walk through the park, I can feel myself slip away.
The eyes go numb.
The brain goes high functioning but super rational.
My skin doesn't fit anymore,
Like a suit that never got tailored properly.
The doctor calls it Dissociating.
I see that shopping cart man.
The soap from his last shower has long since washed away.
His skin is the cracked, brown leather of a bull whip and his voice rings
    out like an Indiana Jones anthem.
He speaks in parables and nonsensical phrases.
I wonder if he is me.
Or am I him?
Walking through the park, watching him, I see no recognition of this
    world in his eyes, and wonder what he's living in.
Maybe his entire life is a delusion and he sees his life through my eyes.
Is what I've been seeing and living what he sees and lives?
Will I wake up one day, and look around and realize I'm in this park?
I've always been here.
I told the Doctor I don't think so.
I don't think I'm actually Dissociative.
I just often argue the actuality of my own existence with myself.

He said he, "Pulled himself up by his boot straps" and made his first million by the time he was my age.

I looked down.
I was wearing slip ons.

The door is sealed, but voices ring out
And purple hearts still point the way.

There's a pipe in the corner that we're too afraid to pick up,
And microscopic devils reside in these sheets.

The screaming upstairs is getting louder,
And this won't be the first time I've tried to hurt her.

***** rigs with missing caps make up our mind,
The floor is the safest route here.

But this is home, and love resides here.

It shows itself among smelly blankets cuddled together in the
    midnight sun.
Or in the way permission is asked before saliva trades with water.
It smiles from behind broken skin and bruised eyes,
then saunters away to go spare change a meal.

Goldilocks stopped on red.
I was waiting for green.
Blue eyes met for a moment,
When she saw me for what I was.
A rabbit in wolf's fur.
A drifter with a college education.

My eyes were not so honest.
And she passed by,
With a smile and a wave.

I might have been the luckiest man on campus that day.
I may have been the last.

I woke last night in a sweat,
eyes gaped open and throat tight shut.
I awoke, from the American Dream.
My original fear was that I wouldn't know what was going on.
Upon waking, a new fear was confirmed.
The fear of knowing, and not having the power to speak.
My mouth had been sewn shut by the Patriot Acts of the powers that be.
My audience was rendered deaf as the Freedom of Speech, or even
   my freedom to speak was rendered obsolete in the aftermath of
        smoking towers.
Now we're living in a world of smoky mirrors and no one seems to
    remember that John Kerry was never against the war.
The hippies and the boomers raised the standard on the education /
    occupation link.
Now, most of the class of 03' is helping with a different sort of
    occupation, cause they don't have the money to be "progressive".
Plato once said, "Be wary of any enterprise requiring new clothes"
    and this sent me into a panic.

I don't want to march for war, and likewise for peace.
I see "regime change starts at home" stuck to the bumper of a black SUV
But when I asked that lady for change, she said she didn't have any.

Now I'm sitting on the sidewalk thinking about government, listening
   to Dylan and realizing no basement medicines will shut out new
       realizations.

And the thought crosses my mind:

"Maybe this is the way it's always been."

Poetry is a fickle thing to be in a relationship with.
It is a domineering lover who does not know the meaning of "later",
    but needs it done, "Now! Now! Now!"
As such, I have had to pull the car over on the side of an interstate,
    hit the 4-ways, and hope for the best.
All because I needed to scratch out some thoughts on love, because maybe
    I'm on to something.
Or I sit in my office, which is an un-insulated closet filled with disheveled
    thoughts and ******* that pre-dates my existence.
It is because of this chill in the air that most of my writing is done
    at the bar.
And with it, the worry that those drinks seep into my work more than
    they should.
But still lady poetry stays, if only to heckle that all my favorite writers
    were published posthumously.
I scoff at this and acknowledge that not a one amongst us as a species
    has died without regrets.
And in this, I too shall be no different.