I am a ghost among ghosts
in an inescapable town filled
with judgmental eyes peering
around sharp corners and
through closed doors. My
pumping pink ventricles
are turning white
with every passing second
that I spend waiting for something
with life to cross my trail.
Unfortunately, holding my breath
for things that
never come has become a
***** habit that I can't rid of,
and my lungs are brittle from the
compressed breaths and
toxic cigarette smoke I subject them
to. They say it takes
twenty one days to stop habits,
but an hour doesn't pass without
me thinking of all the reasons
I am unwillingly invisible and
how you made me this way. The
only thing that acknowledges my
form are clocks,
and they only remind me,
with every tick and grind,
that I am one unit of time closer to
being another collection of
dismembered bones
covered in dirt with a
chunk of stone telling others
my label and a saying that tries to
put meaning in something
that was never going to matter.
Many say that I am being
morbidly negative about my
existence, and maybe their right,
but on good days I like to think that
maybe i was meant to be
good fertilization for lovely flowers
that a senseless boy will pick for a
troubled girl someday.

I have always contemplated the purposes
of Mother Nature during nights
I couldn’t sleep due to her tears and screams
escaping the blooming clouds. I cannot grasp
how such a series of complex events could be summed up
all under a single name
and a single purpose,
but I have never had much faith in anything extraterrestrial.
I don’t mean to be cruel or depressing,
but truth is, I have always wanted to understand
how anything could have color when it was destined
to decay into the gray ground
with the unrealized hope of benefiting
future generations. Evolution is such an amazing thing,
but I believe Mother has
made mistakes in the goal towards an everlasting planet,
one that could or could not be alone
in its livelihood among the ever expanding space
of filling emptiness. Simple animalistic characteristics
could have been enough for the world to sustain itself,
and she could have flourished beyond every imaginable garden,
meadow, and dune we dream about, but as we know well,
sustaining only satisfies sadness. I think, for the first time in the universes,
this unattainable event under a single existing name
craved for something more than the “same thing”.
Somehow, and in some crippling way,
she changed the predictable process of change
to create something that would demonize the
innocence of this planet. Scientists always electrify the fact that
Darwin said natural selection is supposed to
allow beneficial characteristics in a species
to take precedent over others,
but has anyone considered the
evolution of self-awareness? I contemplate
this question often long into the nights and
sometimes until the weary sun cleans the black sky of its worries.
I try to ask the monsters under my bed,
the insecurities biting at the edges of my head,
the anxieties pounding at my torso,
and the disorders plaguing my lungs into peril for
suggestive phrases and clicks,
but I cannot get a straight answer because they themselves are
creations of this awareness. I wonder about this
evolutionary characteristic, and I wonder if maybe someday the future generations
will ever be able to escape the horrific results of this
survival technique. I pray that the planet turns in our favor
and allows Mother to be happy again.
I’m not sure this will ever happen, however,
because maybe even the single
most powerful existence we will ever be able to prove is real,
has its demons too.