It’s a very conflicting feeling
writing poetry in high school—
the world overlooks us
as we sulk for recognition,
hoping that one day
long after we’re too dead
to get any kind of satisfaction out of it
that our words will be immortalized
and important enough to appear
in the worn pages
of some high school kid’s English textbook.

It’s a very conflicting feeling indeed
to hear every teenage voice around you
sigh in a collective groan of boredom
when assigned to read what every
grey-haired scholar calls
a poetic masterpiece—
the highest caliber
of anything you write could ever hope to achieve.

It’s the most absurd irony
that a poet’s world is a binary one.
If you ever manage to crawl out
of the black pit of mediocre obscurity, maybe one day
(long after you’re dead, of course)
your greatest ambitions
can be actualized—the literary purging
of your soul, the collective narrative
of your world view can one day be immortalized
as the dull assignment
some overwhelmed honor’s student
can suffer through.

I once said I’d die without you,
and you without me.
I’ve been counting the months
since I’ve heard from you—
and the silence is still painful
But it dulls
by every day that passes
where I eat the words I once declared
with such conviction
that I’d never be just fine—
Carrying on my own life,
A you without me; a me without you.

There must be a word
for the bleak realization
of the systematic inhumanity
on which our world operates—
which carries the
self-directed disgust
of how desensitized we’ve
been— up until the moment
the thought shakes us
that our ending point
is a corpse—
like a child distraught to realize
his body is a separate entity
than the womb who
created him,
How he curses an indifferent god
who has left him naked,
How as a race we suffer
by the cruelty of a creator
to give us the concept
of eternity, yet
the tantalizing confines
of mortality.

I wish
I could fill this
space, with something
more meaningful
than this ringing in my ears—
echoes of lost sentiments
that were never written down.

In high school
we learn of logarithms, iambic meter
how to balance an equation between zinc oxide
and excess hydrogen gas–
only to find there was no reaction to begin with.

We’re told that colleges get to know you
through three letter acronyms—ACT, SAT, GPA…
and our name is somewhere in the application.
It’s repeated to us to the point of meaninglessness,
like a perpetually chanted word:
Grades, scores and testing, testing, testing.
The students they want know everything
that will be forgotten by their thirtieth birthday.

I anticipate the day
that our Geometry teacher is to write an essay
on the individual’s struggle
against a systematically inhumane society
in Orwell’s 1984
only to receive a “D” under the scrutinizing eye of
the honor’s English teacher

Or, perhaps, the day someone in charge
is faced with some insufferable fate
the textbooks call chemical stoichiometry,
thirty years after repressing memories
of having to memorize the periodic table

Socrates once said that the youth today
will be the demise of civilization.
We contradict our parents, are smug in the face of authority
and tyrannize our poor teachers—
a youth who will ultimately leave behind a world
too damaged for our children to inherit.
Funny he said this
roughly 2,000 years ago–
I think my dad said something like that last year.

But, until the day we grow up to pay taxes
and marry someone we despise,
we’re just stupid teenagers.

They sent Daddy home
from suicide watch—
he was bound to lose it someday.
Mom locked up the
kitchen knives.
She comes back to me,
her quivering voice
delivers some deluded promise,

“He said he won’t hurt himself,
I’m just being safe.”

The house is still silent with absence,
he stares at the wall—
hidden in the basement
like the last twenty thirty years
of some void of a life,
guarded by an eggshell
cracked by decades of denial.

You aged ten years in a weekend, Daddy,
And I always feared I’d bury you
before I witnessed my first grey hair,
silver like the lining
of some magical cloud
I can’t seem to distinguish
in this homogenous fog, looming
in the bleak and inescapable sky
hovering over me
with careless indifference

I knew there’d be a day like this,
only now has it come true.
I knew you couldn’t love me, Daddy,
You never loved you, too.

I moved out in a backpack
of crumpled clothes
stuffed hastily in tears—resorting
to the bomb shelter of cowardice
so I won’t see us
collapse into eachother.

Maybe it was a better idea—I breathe
my own air, you breathe yours.
It’s calmer here, but I still
can’t stop hearing the silence
of that empty house
I know you hear right now.
I left with five pounds of baggage
on my shoulders, you shackled
two tons more to my ankle.
You know I had to leave,
I couldn’t bear the silence—
the last trace of himself
he left for you.

Dad showed me his new apartment;
we stared silently into off-white walls.
When he asked me
why I was so quiet, I muttered
“No reason.”
All I could think about
was why the absolute hell
would that ******* exchange his family
for some barren apartment
with nothing
to his name but a mattress without sheets
and weeks-untouched guitars
scattered across a hideous tan carpet,
accompanied only by silence.

I peeked in your medicine cabinet, too—
and painfully I read the labels.
Anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-psychotic,
anti-everything they found wrong with you.

Mom still didn’t give you
your pocket knife collection back
that she locked up when you were
under suicide watch.
And I couldn’t dismiss the irony.
Dad, of all people you’d be the one
to end your life
with a hand-crafted Italian switchblade
previously under neat display
behind an immaculate glass door,
only to act in violence
no one could have anticipated.

I still don’t want to go home,
and I’ll give you any excuse
that sounds half-way rational.
But what I dread more than anything
is to hear that bitter silence—
ghosts of ugly words
we’ll never say to eachother.