As guilty as I am, I guiltlessly tell you that I miss you
You're never home, but hey, neither am I
Your freedom is important to you, and I want to understand that, but I can't say that I already do  

Now I have this aching, this urge, this itch, this feeling, that screams at me I have to appreciate you
And now when I try to do just that, you run away from the house which we used to live in

I hurt you whenever I pursued Romance
And that was wrought with a lack of understanding from both of us

And now here we are, standing so far away from each other, yet only a couple miles removed,
and I don't know who
or where
or what
you are anymore



You remember when we would love poetry together?
Do you remember the feelings we had and the solidarity
I remember feeling like you losing your faith was the worst thing that could happen to both of us,  


and then it happened to me

I remember fostering our relationship by going to a church which only you go to now
I miss when we talked about doing drugs in the abstract, never actually doing them
I miss when I could tell you about Romance, and you would listen

I miss sharing my whole self with you
I miss sharing any of myself with you

"If we meet no gods it is because we harbor none"
And I thought by now I would have garnered one

And how convenient it is to have a god
So in my groups I wouldn't be so odd

An atheist among theists is just as alone
As a peasant being given a throne

Ostracized by the nobles, yet above them
Given the duty to rule and to love them

Once I am done giving egregious groans
I can start standing straight these stones

If my heart cracked open and spilled around
It would drown a town in coffee grounds

And once we rummage through its rubble
No gods would burst from my bubble

No god inside nor without
Only solitude and doubt

to observe the observer
is to love and to serve her

as her bottom lip secedes from the top,
i still my thoughts til they stop

To belong to the observer
is to long observe her

It is to experience her analysis,
brushing her hair in wait for her synthesis

Covered in logic and reason
her critique or thought comes out
and though it can bring painful change in season
hearing it is the only righteous route

To listen to the observer
is to be challenged by her

to take her challenge is to listen with humble ears
to take her challenge is to gain wisdom for years

This is what it means to love and to hold her
to observe my beautiful, sweet observer

Hurry up, and run if you can!
Make sure to make your way to the white van
It's your hope to get to her, it's the love to give to her
It's the heart that's throbbing, and these moments robbing

Down those roads you go
And onto the last
'Round those turns so slow
And to her arms alas

Those thin fair arms give life
They throne you, reduce strife
Your heart beats, and hers as well
The love sounds like a ringing bell

O, great reunion, that of lovers
To reward, renew, and finally recover
From the loss of time we spent apart
To join each other by hand and finally by heart

I am skeptical of you
How do I trust an *****
That's been so wrong
In times past?

You devil,
Reaching out to hold the hand of a new lover
When you haven't let go of the past

It took a long, long time
But I learned how to turn you off
And now that you're on standby
I don't know if I can trust you

Heart,
Battered by baggage
Beaten to the bone,
Do your nerves still work?

Are you able to discern the inner workings
Of the paramour's heart?
Are we compatible?
Are we in love?

Are we loving each other?
Are you able to be trusted
With our great future?

O, mosaic of my oft marveled at Mosie
You fade away as swift as the windstorm enters
Mosaic, I've built you up in my mind's cubbies
And you permeate through my brain's centers

Every experience boiled itself into me
Constructing a picture of you that I could see
Which I could consult when I reached difficulty
Or whose answer I could envision in monotony

O, Mosaic, you quickly go, as hurt intrudes
The pain pervades all points of space
It destroys you and ceaselessly protrudes

Gone are the days when I'd see your face and caress it
Gone are the prayers we'd hold up our relationship and bless it
And now gone is your magnificent mosaic
Even though it pains me just to say it

O, Healing, come faster than your predecessor
May you permeate the place we made and become its successor
And, God, can You be real and continue to bless her?

As your mosaic fades away
Dreams of tomorrow thus can't stay

As your mosaic breathes its last breath
Let us exhale that last sigh
The one we always talked about before our death

This time, drifting further and farther apart
This time, holding our aching and breaking hearts

It's been more than a hundred years now
Since I started coming home and ****** you

When I first started, you used to look like yourself
Now you're a mix of me and you

Do you even resemble yourself anymore?
Do you still look in the mirror anymore?
Do you see yourself in you still?

I, the ******* man in this relationship
Won you as a prize. You're a token.
I've put you through all this ****
And as a result, you're just broken

You're not ******* on the **** like a child
You were given to me when you were weak and wild

Weak and mild, you never got a chance to thrive by yourself
See, I wasn't the first man to ******* over

Look at that history, baby
Look at that long line of Spaniard influence

I've felt you up,
Walked your mountains,
Seen your castles,
Traversed your beaches,
Been shown your Capitol,

And I don't weep for those Tainos
I saw pictures of them on your walls;
What's that about? Do you still love them?
You better not show your love to anyone else, you hear?
Are you here? Are you listening? Well, listen up.
I said: You shall have no lovers before me, you hear?

See, I'm a jealous god. I rule you, you understand?
Or should I say, tu entiendes? Is that better?
You get me now? You feel me now?

Well I haven't stopped feeling you.
In fact, I'm sending over my colleagues
To feel you too

Here,
Have my big pharma
Have my baggage
Have my tourists
Have my people
Have my taxes
Have no representation
Have none of the benefits
Ten decepcion

Ay, si, que decepcion

Look at yourself. Do you even speak Spanish anymore?
Do you still remember how to?

Come on, just forget about that.
I can't speak it, and you know it's disrespectful
To speak it in front of people who can't
So just don't

Matter fact, all I'ma allow you to do is sit there

And take it

Take it like the ***** I made you into
Take it like I've conditioned you to
Take it and don't argue with me
Take it, or I'll toss you to the sea

You don't wanna drift off, now, do you?
You see, come June, you'll have to choose
Now what exactly are you gonna do?
I never stop pondering it, too

Like what will happen when you tell me you want to break up?
You think I'm gonna take it? You've got it backwards:
You take it in this relationship--not me

And what happens if you wanna be respected?
Do you really expect it
To force me to give you back everything I stole from you?

Well, I cannot say I know what will happen either
But be realistic: don't expect me to stop hurting you
It's what I do

At times what a man can own
Is a house, some land, a home
A woman, a wife, his daughters
But not his sons or his father

A man's voice is respected unless his pitch is too high
Because a woman's voice seems just way too shy
And a high voice sounds like a woman's: inferior
Because all we are judged by is our exterior

He does not typically write sweet refrains
He does not feel any monthly pains
His feelings are for the inside
He doesn't love, only shows pride

And how does he go on living thusly,
Showing love, but only roughly?
Where does he grow? Can he ever know
That his own son's heart groans when he goes
About spouting prideful privileged words?
They attack me like preying birds

And I am the fawn, to whom no one belongs
I am the heartbeat and the aching due to wrongs
I am the taken aback by art
I am the trembling of a heart

So then here I sit, so very distant from him
Yet still a mirror image of him.
With my chromosomes resembling his,
I observe roses while he throws words like fists

He possesses objects even if they're humans
He tells them what to do for his own amusement,
Locking his heart far away until it becomes
A fabled leviathan he keeps from his sons

Dear Patriarchy, how you've stolen my claim to normality!
How your disadvantaging of others is an intrinsic reality!
Keep your *****, dying hands away from me
Your grasp forms almost everything I can see

I didn't want you upon entering this earth
I haven't wanted you since the day of my birth
But my rebirth has found me dying from what you do
While you're slowly decimated, We all still die too

The relentless passage of time will one day ****** me
But until then it murders me still

You and I once passed each other on this sidewalk,
Walking in the same direction
We created love between us and we watched it grow
We kindled it like it was our mission to see the flame
Become bigger than something either of us could ever make
individually

Yet I stand here, alone, on my side of the road
Watching you walk by and continue living

You've taken the pieces of me I entrusted with you
And I watched this fire extinguish
It feels like I'm standing still while
all the world keeps revolving
And you along with it

I feel like a third observer, untouched by space and time,
Taking the relative aspect of experience out of Einstein's equations

And I can see the passage of time
And I can see myself and you and us and the flame that you blew out
And there, I see you walk past me,
Murdering us

The whole world remains while I wait for my recovery
Why can't it stop with me while I wait?
Why couldn't we have grown together?
Where does the space which lovers lofty make
Dissipate?

I travel back into my body, and recognize my objective view
As an intrinsically subjective one of you
And I have to keep walking
Just as relentlessly as time and you pass

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

Just moments after the eye stops staring insatiably at us
You can hear the flicking on of all those machines
As you walk down the flooded streets so slow
The violinists pull the strings, and on they go
One to the left of us, three to the right
Two in front of us, and none to the behind

The conductors swing their arms
The symphony clangs, alarms
Lighting up the homes and the tv screens
Chilling the musicians, and the shaky beams
Walk around some more, you'll hear one hit a low C
While you slosh through the street's home sea

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?

Here it comes, and it comes like a flood
The day we wash, we've washed with blood

It's covered in red, crimson, and scarlet
It's when I'm a *****, a *******, a harlot

Here it passes, coming ashes to ashes
Chocolates fill up our stashes and stashes

We give them in eros, love, and romance
Then we strut, sway, and dance

Around the questions and inquiries
Of will they be? Won't they be?

In the end it equals zero and naught
Leaves us in pain, disdain, distraught

One day we'll recover, unite, and heal
When the pain isn't hidden and concealed

Come down, calm down, and finally descend
Your high horse is at its exit, its death, its end

In a meadow stands a flower
Over whom most things atower
And he is subject to the wily wind,
A devilish thing which rescinds
Then blows again like fans,
Oscillating their hands

The flower crumbles under Emotive oppression,
The wind pressing on him to go north
He obeys the force which forces him
And he flings back

In a trough or in a peak
Rendered meek or weak
The flower subject to whim
Is put to death by the wind

Yet on another day still
The wind falls through a hill
Reaches the flower and
Uplifts him with its farther hand

And in either case the flower,
Broken down by the wind
Or built up by it,
Is nothing but a product thereof

Perhaps he could've grown stronger
Maybe a good day would go on longer
Perchance his dance with his oppressor
Could resemble fixedness lesser

The wind possesses him yet blesses him
It transfers its goodness and its malice
His petals will be gifted with oxygen
Or fly off, like ridden callous

Great enough to whisper in the ears of extremists?
So great he told you to leave me?
How great is the god who does not belong to me?
All you whom this god belongs to, sing with the singer
How great is this god?

How great is this god that he would lay silent
While millions are disenfranchised?
In whom is he whispering now?
To the abolitionists or the traders?
How great is this god?

When those who picket funerals
picket weddings too
Is this god ever so present with them?
Is this god in you when you keep me up at night
And tell me the last two years have been for nothing?

Name above all nomenclature
Worthy of the praise of those whom this god belongs to
Apparently, even I will sing how great
Is this god

And how about that time when we were close to each other
And we started talking about people of the same *** loving one another
Did you notice the miles that immediately spawned between us
As soon as you placed the dividing wall between us
We shot away from each other like we had no other choice
Like positive magnet to positive pole

And now, apparently, we are to listen to this voice
Of a god who's apparently worthy of the praise of those
Whom this god belongs to
And apparently even I will sing how great
Is this god

All you whom this god belongs to, sing with the singer
About how great is this god
And ask this rhetorical question
Without ever actually having to do
Any thinking

Name above all nomenclature
Apparently is too great for words
Obviously goes beyond cultural conceptions
Intrinsically dies at the wrong hills
Clearly lies through his teeth

And apparently I will even sing
How great is this god
When I am dead and in an afterlife
I will notice how wrong I was
In saying this god couldn't be

Apparently I will even sing
With the singer
And we will reminisce about
How I was a fundamentalist
When I got things "right"

There is power in finding worth
By subtracting it from others
And when my name is separate
From the Divine, I
Fail to be great

Anthony, so far from god's name,
Nomenclature poised to be lesser
Belongs to a being whose divinity is lesser
And wholly separate
From this god

Name above all nomenclature
Worthy of the praise of those whom this god belongs to
The singer's heart goes out to you,
Grows a mouth and sings, "how great
Is this god?"

I fear a better question would be where
Is this god?
And is this god loving?
Can he and I be loving together
Can I be loved?

What is arbitrary greatness but the same exclusive club
You ascribe to when you posit that it is not my god
Nor your god
Not the god of every human being
But the god of a tribe

"our god"

In other universes perhaps we end up together
And we end up weathering storms in tandem

For now I'm tasked with the duty of being your friend
As you turn yourself into a means to an end

And sometimes you get there because of me
And this is an expression of things unseen
Things too terrible to be seen
Things I'd hold tightly, and closely
Because I can't hold you closely

You are a dream that floats out just in front of the horizon but which falls off the edge of the world if I draw too near

You are the heartbeat skipping in a parked car, and the wings clipping of best friendships formed here

Though you are closer to me than any others
You are the most distant of all my lovers

Though you are the nearest in knowing my soul,
You are the furthest possibility as a whole

When I drop you off so you can cut yourself in half and be used,
Don't fall into the trap that states I don't care about you

I am a slave to my desire to help you be who you want to be
Even if that means destruction especially to you and at times me

Don't fall victim to the hoax of victimizing yourself
Recognize your worth by choosing the contrary, your health

Don't think for a second that I don't love you
Because of all the truths spoken in this poem
This is the truest: that I adore you
That you know me and don't judge me
And I crown you for the way you treat me

Because you, like no other, know me
You, unlike my other lovers, know me
But you, unlike all the others, can't be
A part of me while you're not apart from me

Don't believe in the lie that all you're good for
Is these few moments of euphoria

You're more than an object
Yet you're still the object of my desire

Who am I? What am I?
It's been a while since I cried
Am I a brain on top of a body?
Just processor performing code?
Well, who wrote the code?
Who wrote it?
It's been a while since I was I
I'm not a brain, I have one
I've got hardware put there by Someone else
Who am I?
I'm a computer running software I didn’t write
I'm a soul interacting with a body, a brain
Whose health I neglect on a reg

What am I?
I'm a decaying accumulation of skin
And blood and bone and neurons
I got neurons in my heart
And that's a good place to start
The heart is the mouthpiece of the soul
My identity gets ******* in the whole
Idea of my performance
And my influence
Like if I sing a song badly, my soul takes the hit
And if I lead my partner astray, the whole of me is ****
The whole of me is ****

There's holes in me
But who put them there?
I combust in small increments
My skin flies off in perfect circles
They're fragments
My heart, it's hiding behind these explosions
Hiding behind them because it causes them
Because my mouthpiece is expressing my hate
My lack of love for myself
Hate is just a word we put on the shelf
It's like darkness and coldness
Describing something through absence
Darkness; the absence of light
Coldness; the absence of heat
If hate is the absence of love I might
Just be the one who beats me
Who defeats me
Who carries my heart, my brain, the rest of me
Tied around my neck on a string that I pull through
Like my body is in captivity

I'm privileged to honor this body that I didn’t make
I'm greatly gifted a brain to maintain
My heart, my body, my brain
They shouldn't be strangling me
They shouldn't be dragged through the dirt
They should be a part of me

I am a soul
I have a mouthpiece
My heart is my mouthpiece
My brain is my hardware
That rusts and which I expend

God help me love me
And Who I am
And Who You are

God, make it so apparent to me in my falling out
That I am a part of the three-legged stool
To Love You before all else
To Love everyone else
And to Love myself
Help me see You accurately
God help me
God help this American switch culture
I am not a machine that functions at the flip
Of a switch
I am a soul, a CVT, a cable that climbs up and down
Depending on the speed of the wheels
And decelerating is okay
And (not but) accelerating is wonderful

I do not go 60MPH because I flipped a switch
I go 70MPH because I climb
I climb
God help me climb
And to falter well
And to suffer well
Humble me in my faltering suffering

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?

lover of love's long lost history
you are so intrinsically dear to me
and i know you can hear the beat
when our hands go blistering

i love the neapolitan but not naples
listen to how the city sings like the others
but she buys time and barely bothers
to remove her appropriating staples

she is a reflection
of a reflection
of a reflection
of a reflection

but you, my dear neapolitans,

how holistically human you happen to be
and what a human thing to do
to braid oneself with a few
ventricles of other hearts unseen

you are not special insofar as you are human
and the home you make mistakes you
for a permanent resident, assumes you
are a planted person whose sole purpose is bloomin

but you are dynamic, not static
you do not live in someone's attic
you move around, the ground beneath you
isn't bequeathed to staying beneath you,

you

keep moving and loving and all of the aboving
because our love isn't something
that can be taken away by a location change
or how 21,000 hearts are arranged

Star that drifts farther and further apart

Where goes thou with my wanting, waning heart?

The many years light takes to get to me

Have worn me down, I can no longer see

The bright brilliance of your shining red light.

Where goes the space which lovers lofty make

When their separation comes swift in sight?

Does it disappear with the time it takes

To build the union that passed far away?

How it passes and how we go astray!

We hold our breaths in want to make it stay

But we must exhale as our lights red-shift

And our stellar bodies begin to drift

Lest we lose our light and our bright array

We are always the hero
Of our own story
Blind to the pain we inflict
Unable to see beyond the scope
Of our two limited eyes

Strands of gold and oceans for eyes
Your body is one thing I can't despise

You heart is encapsulated in fit and white
In your skin that's silk and bright

Your forehead is a freckled bed sheet
Where I rest, I love, and I weep

The flow of melted gold crashes
At your brows and your tasteful lashes

Then the two oceans, green and gold,
Meet, greet, and together grow old

It's a green ocean but it's pure and clean
Even though black can also be seen

I want to swim in them with my own eyes
To dive and go deeper until I
Can no longer see the sun
Only then will I be done

You've got a white scarf, but it's unreliably so
I could count on it to be white for many years
Until last year, when it didn't quite resemble snow
It changed colors, and brought up many fears
Like will you make it til tomorrow?
and will you still be here?

You used to wear it like it embodied majesty
Like you were a lion and it was your mane
Curling around your neck and screaming of divinity
I know that mane better than I know your name

(buddy)

The leaves will change and your scarf will too
Your head will bump mine, and I'll bump yours too

I'm running from my thoughts and the truth
This might be all for naught and tomorrow you
Will be here still, and I won't have to say goodbye
To your scarf, your mane, our collective life

Maybe your heart will still be kept in mine,
Released only when our heads collide

Your personality is truth
Your personality is you
I try to ask others to be like you but they can't
That plight is wrong and an ineffective chant

Your heart, your personality, your truth
Will be held in my heart regardless
of whether or not tomorrow I see you

And I do see you.
For a while there, you were hiding behind your disease
But now you're able to come out of your shell with ease
And now I can have another collection of moments with you
Your personality
Your truth

And you are truth.
For a year I thought you were gone and that the next
Moment I saw you, you'd be descending into a grave
You would be gone and only accessible through memories
Your truth
Your personality

And you are personality.
It pained me every time I saw you, thinking I wouldn't see
It and how you walked and how you cried for water when
You needed it. I'd trip over you, and trample you, but you
You are truth
You are personality

You're here today, eternally in my heart
You're here tomorrow, and when we are apart
A year down the road, and a plethora more
You'll be in my heart forevermore

The part of me that you bring out will never exist again on this earth
And your white scarf will never be seen by my brown eyes
But I can hold you here
Right here in my heart
And you can pur
And I can contemplate when you'll bump my head again

Hi
I’m anthony brandy
And I’m a quarter filipino
Or at least, that’s what my dad tells me
And I’m inclined to believe him because
When I look at the curvature
Of the bones around our eyes
I think I can see it

That somewhere deep down I’m not just a white guy
With a white name
And a whole lot of privilege that comes along with that
But you can’t see it,
And I think that’s what matters

We judge people by who we see they are
And then they become who we say they are

You can’t see it, but I speak Spanish, too
But not because it’s my heritage
Because my white heritage doesn’t have anything to be proud of

I learned Spanish to communicate with others

It all started out as a way to check if people were talking behind my back
And I never even realized that that was a form of guilt-presumption
But as I learned to conjugate and put my words in the right order,
I found out that there are people on the other side of that language barrier
And they have warmer hearts than you could ever imagine
And their arms give the best hugs
And their eyes tell the toughest stories to hear

Like when they came over here, and people heard their accents
They were teased and told to go back to where they came from
And everytime an ******* said that to them,
That home they were told to go back to was always Mexico
Even though Mexico’s not the only country south of Texas

You see, we judge by what we see
And if we’ve never seen or noticed anyone from other countries
We overgeneralize

You can’t see it, but I’m also encumbered by years of religious restrictions
That tell me that my ****** feelings are not allowed
That my doubts have no place near my faith
That my eyes must always bounce
That my vocal cords were meant only for ****** Hillsong songs
And my hands were made to pluck easy four-chord songs
And three-chord songs if you’re lucky

You can’t see it, but there is resentment under this shirt, welling in my chest
And it seeps out of my skin even when I don’t want it to
And I sometimes think it’s best left unexpressed,
But I know, even deeper down than that resentment, that that’s not true

You can’t see it, but I so often feel unnoticed by my peers and my family
Because those doubts that I mentioned before are dangerous,
And my family has wasted no opportunity to tell me that it’s not okay to be who I am,
Having introduced dynamism to my faith
So I am left with only one option:
To hide those things, and keep my mouth shut

What you don’t know, family member, is that when you put on that bumper sticker that said God doesn’t believe in atheists,
You told me you don’t care for me
And what you don’t know, family member, is that when you voted for Trump,
You told my immigrant friends that they should stay away, and that it’s better for them to dwell in their oppression than to even remotely acknowledge it
And what you don’t know, family member, when you tell me how sad it would be for me not to be a Christian,
You tell me it’s not okay to be who I am

But nevertheless, I am who I am
And I will be what I will be
And who I am is a quarter Filipino, privileged white guy who’s trying to do his part
And I wish you could come along with me for that journey
But you are so deeply invested in remaining static,
That I am unsure I can ever help you at all

Telling you stories about my relationships with immigrants can only get me so far into showing you that these people
Are in fact people
And my college education can only get me so far into a conversation with you before you notice that I’m one of those people you call a “libtard”
And you disregard everything I say

I still have my foot in the door, but how long can I keep it open?
When will I blow my cover and be authentic?
Should I have ever kept things a secret in the first place?
Am I just trying to avert inevitable growing pains?

I could not tell you, and I cannot either
But I am nonetheless growing,
Dynamic,
Laden with doubts,
And struggling to make something good come out of my life
I hope you can see that
I hope you can understand
Why I do what I do