I approach most desires
like a competition; can I
**** better than him;
can I be famous at twenty-
-three since he was famous at
twenty-four -- I must be able
to sink better than him.

God, it is exhausting. I
feel like I'm dancing with
a machine; a phantom that
I can never catch, for it runs
on my blood; my insecurities;
my passion -- and, boy, oh boy,
can I attest to having plenty of
  that stuff, ladies and germs.

I think, truly, that I am
encompassing the American Dream
I think is utterly flawed; that I think
is futile in nature; that I am sure of
is the closest thing to Hell, in this
Godless, spiritually motherless
dark shoebox of sudden collisions;
this space of useful and useless
results, splayed onto and into
our hearts, asking for reverence.

There is nothing  I want more
than to be sure that my importance
is not illusory. I am not sure if
I am real.

The window is up;
sounds of rain crinkle in,
like the static in the voice
of a faraway caller.

My cats are perched,
one grey, one tabby,
listening with me, as
we stare at miniature
mudslides glaze gener-
-ations of ants, probably
clinging onto strands of
grass; waiting to become
the past.

I think of success and
what it means to me.
I look in my wallet and
count one-two-three;
one reason to like the rain;
two reasons to embrace strife;
three reasons to consume pain;
enough zeroes to choose a life
not smothered in mud, not one
where I cling onto the grass.

I dream of a dream where
my dollar bills can last.

I think she lost a part of herself,
picking up the pieces. And that's
okay; the universe works because
something is given for
something to be gained.

Her parents were red-blooded
Americans; they drank confirmation-
bias and the minimization of minorities.
They would make her problems as small
as the countries, they couldn't find on a map,
but could find in their hearts to demonize.

Oh yes, the demons: what used to
afflict her and corrupt her pure heart.
To them, she wasn't a teenager --
a child -- stressed from carrying a
family, featuring a mother with
a brain tumor; guest starring
'I-stunt-your-growth-with-Jesus'
as the understudy for mental
health awareness.

No, she wasn't a child; she was
a burden because she cut herself,
because her legs grew too thin;
as thin as the crucifixes around
the proud, turning necks, holding
dismissive heads of 'Why-would-
you-want-to-be-dead' Christians
and 'I-don't-understand-what-isn't-
in-the-Bible' fat, white relatives.

To make things short as her
life could have been: she dipped
in and out of drugs, featuring
****** and pills that would
dip in and out of her body,
like a fool's gold life jacket,
soaking in the waves of her
pale, transitioning to adulthood,
twenty year-old waters.

She saved herself, and
they thanked God and the
boy and mostly everyone
else but her. And the little
brother sat, sinking in a seat
softer than his deep-seated
hateful beliefs. But, the
truth is that she saved not
only herself, but also the
handsome, white, tall,
smart, talented image of
'Holy-****-what-a-tall-
drink-of-privilege.' A
tall drink who cared for
her more than the country
cared about being right; who
loved her more than the parents
of the degenerates living in some
unknown collection of poems about the
disenfranchised and American angst.

She was a protest, very wondrous;
a halting of the longest dark,
a breath of fog floating towards
a lonely, very deep pond.

And she was only beginning.
And it was all very exciting.

Solo, like Star Wars or women's soccer
I sit on a ***** chair with pure liquor
sealed from the rest of the world

Numb, like Linkin Park or lithium
they hold my wallet like it's a gun;
want to use it to gauge my meaning.

If you want a dollar, babe, then
you gotta work to separate
yourself from everything sane
or how else can you gain

the feelings you see on t.v.,
what E! says is reality--
because you're told that's
what matters, entirely.

Identity; conform to be something
marketable -- or, at the very least,
conventional. I want my insides
to be considered pretty, but
I'd have to hope someone
would give the effort to
cut me open and ignore the joy
that my bleeding out would bring.

They say we're degenerates
as we walk with sore shoulders,
flimsy backs, fractured dreams.

The word millennial is used like
some derogatory word --
we're meant to feel like ****
because our parents failed us.

Because smartphones help us
release dopamine.

Because we're addicted to
virtual realities.

Because we **** strangers
that we hope validate us.

No one understands why
the news says this about drugs
and this about violence -- or why
we do 'those things' and if we
have any '******* sense'.

It's beyond them.
Maybe beyond us.

It's higher than our weekends;
lower than our expectations.

I have a hard time in bars,
specifically ones I don't belong in.

Sometimes I stand at the bar,
this wooden horseshoe, among
other faces that I probably blend
into. I want to say, Can you see me,
but don't because why would they?

My friends are mostly gone,
scattered across states like bats:
blindly searching for life.

I didn't deserve them, anyway --
that's not self-pity, that's just
how it is.

At most midnights,
I find myself swallowed by
existential terror.

Like most Americans,
I want to be the best
and have more than my
parents ever did.

Anyway, I don't belong in bars
because I think I am better than
the people there and someone,
who thinks that type of stuff
doesn't deserve a drink -- just
repercussions.

I think I deserve everything
but I don't work hard enough
for the books, people, and love
I imagine.

Perhaps I am plain,
like discount yogurt, waiting
to be touched before I expire --
but there's strawberry, which,
of course, is so much better
than plain, low-fat yogurt.

There's not a universe
where I am low-fat;
why would that happen.

I am stunted: four years
behind every one else.
People like me stay
strangers: the darkest
inside the night.

White whiskers rooted above the trumpet player's lips;
his body moves like a sci-fi parasite, as he spits out songs
at the big bellied, Skecher-chic, boardwalk children.
The kids give a moment's interest before passing by like
armored flies, if armor were cheap cotton shirts and
helicopter parents.

Sooner or later, the sunset meets the brim of his hat.
It's a mystery as to the speed of the trumpet dropping
from his lips to its case, but you'd have to find someone
who cares about those types of things.

His brown, leather, Payless feet jut outward; away from
one another and towards American stores reflecting themselves:
Italian restaurant, Thai restaurant, Car Insurance, Dollar Store.

Quicker than you'd think, his denim hips are clamped by
the wooden arms of a misplaced deck chair, relocated to
a dining table as small and low-income as the man who
saw the dreamlike orange and purple sky drift away
behind the cemetery gray blanket of smoke, rising from
a fractured ground littered in mud-bathed, leaking bodies.

When the night has only begun to settle in, the man's
thick hands carefully adjust her picture, for he fears
the paleness of his fingers will leave more of a residue
than he is accustomed to.

Kept within the copper and green borders, she has
only begun life; twenty-three and never having to apologize,
there is still so much left to the imagination; her olive grey
cheeks are sided to his eyes, ready to be jammed with
baby, mommy, and daddy fragments of windshield;
waiting for the last embrace of a sturdy steering wheel;
her hair still dry and not dampened by insides coming out
or the flying weaker-than-you-think half-gallon of whole milk
that covered -- or washed, depending on your attitude -- the
back of her fifty-three year old head; the eggs fortunately
missing twelve times, hitting what was left of the windshield,
leaving an image comparable to the wall of a bar that not only
has a dartboard but also a man with terrible aim or who had as
much alcohol as the man who slipped his car into Margaret
and Joseph's life.

Joseph looks away from her picture, as his glass eyes begin
to shatter. Running fat palms and bulbous fingers through
the white, over grown lawn on his scarred scalp,
he says her name three times before retiring to the mattress
Margaret picked out.