I miss the summer smells
Before the salacious stopping

Shampoo rising in my car
On the way to church, smalls

Stop smiling
It won’t go on for long

Smile seeping
You’re not wrong

There’s something there
Isn’t there?

But summer, like us
stopped

He said, "if the girlies don't work out"
To come back here

And get **** faced

And maybe watch some bad movies
Like Predator 2

Past security, ticket given without a second glance
It could've been any old white piece of paper

But he didn't check.
Why wouldn't he check?

Inside are the real predators
The real commodifiers

Who stalk prey called women
Look at the way they look at you

Do you notice the way they look at you?
Or is it like breathing air, or a fish in water

And do you buy into the predator's worldview?
What do you really see when you look at the self?

Only what others see, perhaps?
I understand that

In the car, on the ride here
He said, "I'm looking for something special"

"I don't **** and get out"
But definitely don't stop calling them *******

The culture says who they are,
Rather, the culture says what they are

You are complicit in the culture
Just like me

A stoic face toward oppressors
Is still complacent

A face that prides itself on not objectifying women
Yet lays silent in their objectification,

Isn't he just the problem?
Aren't I that problem?

And the songs that are as unspecial as the ***
You purport to not want

Boom louder than your heartbeat
That you can't tell if it's the bass or the blood

Pulsing through your veins

How do you know what you want isn't real?
Are you oblivious to the remake, the unoriginality?

Like the songs stolen without rights,
You adopt your predecessors' predatory propensities

It's all *******.
That's what our glasses are full with.

The Irish drink to connect
We drink to waste away

The same way we do when we sit
And become one with our couch

At the heart of the Ire-land
Is a history of conflict

And inability to have conflict,
Also known as: war

So they sit and they drink
And they talk and they fight

And they all have bad livers
But their hearts aren't clogged.

But back in the club, there's a one size fits all video
Playing over the one size fits all songs

Catered to the one size fits all people
And our one size fits all pallets

In the blur of the headbanging and the deafening
We lose our precious individuality

But maybe I'm acting too pious to judge as I do
But, if you were in my shoes, wouldn't you?

Eating is such a chore
But health dictates that I eat

There is certainly nothing sacred about it
Just mass being converted to energy, right?

That's how it feels too often
It's easy to forget the evolutionary feat

That is you

And what about breathing?
Isn't it routine enough to just forget?

But the unconscious action can be interrupted
With just one phrase:

"You are now manually breathing"

Did you notice that? Once you start,
It's hard to remember how to stop

Yet breath is so essential
Essential enough to forget

As is to eat. And what a chore health is.
But the Good Life dictates it

So I breathe...
So I eat...

Sing, poet Presley! for you are right
'Tis now or never to hold them tight

'Tis now that the heart acts like a wild animal
Trying to break out of its tired cage

'Tis now or never to seize and kiss
Or let ferment and age

'Tis this fleeting moment, passing so swift
That yet paralyzes and perilyzes me

'Tis this, to be enamored with you
And to hold you at a distance

'Tis for distance sake, as we are both
Fur and far apart

But quell your aching heart
For now is not opportune

Neither philosophy nor location
Are terribly in tune

And whether congruency is even possible
For someone like me

Is largely irrelevant for us.
For my lips beg for your lips' touch

So, poet Presley; first name Elvis,
Have we passed into the future,

making now the past?
Do we live in the never?

Why negate when such a strong feeling
Wells within me?

When it could just as easily
Be stored for them later.

Are not things worth waiting for
Worth waiting for?

Close enough to kiss
Well enough to love

Let that thought insist
And float right above

Two could be lovers
Two would be lovers

Still left with that feeling
That repeating fleeting

Goes seeping through
My eyes to you

Who speaks first?
Who delves last?

Who digs up
Decrepit past?

Who lays these
Boundaries?

You

Or

Me?

He turned to me and said, "It just creeps up on you, the way it creeps up on you."
12 hours into your day, you feel inadequate and less than death
And I understood this, so I nodded my head in his direction

"I built up my entire identity"
On many singular things

And it's just so hard right now
"To identify who I am"

Under all this skin "and bone
And a too-caffeinated" heart

Pumping blood so loudly
I'm unable to hear myself

             "think"

And the gray "floods over me"
And I forget what it is to have color

What these cones in my eyes
Were really meant to perceive

And as if there is something able to be discerned by human minds
I turned to him and said, "I know so little about this world
And how it works, but I do know the meant to be"

And "you are not" that grayness
Penetrating your skin, bleeding through your clothes

"And" those eyes that used to shine hazel
Because it's "not what" you're meant to be

It's not who you are "forever"
It is an inescapable "right now"

And those words are too silly and cliché
For me to employ in a real way

So I use them ironically
Knowing that a cliché is a cliché

Because it was able to communicate
At its core some sort of truth

So people repeated it, as if
Repeating by itself creates truth

And at that moment we both realized that each other's eyes
Were brown and blinking in tandem and I could see it  
In both of our eyes a burning question

"Why do we let people affect us this way?"

As if we have a choice