Everyday I go to work,
I feel a little more dead.

If life is the beautiful struggle
then death is the grotesque prize.

How many faces do you wear a day?

I don't need your answer.

But I think you do.

I used to think if I said anything, then I'd have to say everything.

Now I say nothing.

If life is like a movie, it’s uncut and there’s no edits,
no double takes, no music to cue, and no credits.
Get it? Me neither. I’m either here to explain or rename
the blame til it’s sufficiently diverted from the pain of
being actors with no roles,
of reading scripts with mad holes,
of thinking we direct what we don’t hold.

I wake up and live one moment to the next,
knowing it’s a mess but happy that at least I got some cess.
At least my daughter don’t gotta repeat all my steps,
at most I feel that in many ways we’re blessed.

Stress is such a commonality, a normality of
one part calamity and two parts formality.
I could smile through my teeth but what it really mean
when I feel disconnected from the places that you reach?

And do you feel at all connected to my words?
Do they even matter beside to get it off my nerves?
Maybe that’s enough and if it ain’t I couldn’t care,
maybe that’s not all so if I fall, will you be there?

Daily I be thinking what criteria could grade me –
needing numbers, needing stats, just so I could play me.
I smoked too much, forgot my lines instead made up some rhymes.
It’s where I’m from, a place with words and no definition of a time.

It’s where I go when I can’t think of any other,
when I miss my father, sisters, and my mother,
my nephews, friends, and where I’m from.
It’s where I go when I am feeling numb.

My ****’s repetitive if you’ve heard me once before,
cuz it’s only in remembering that’s born the metaphor.
We digest so much edit that we think it could be real,
but when it happens there’s no changing how you feel.
The movies got cuts, the comments got changes,
the post is rewritten and the draft got new pages.

What is the sum of what we see and how it affects?
What is behind the smoke, mirror, haze, and effects?
What is another day to the week? Another minute to the hour?
What is the time it takes for an idea just to flower?

I turned the TV on the other day and a man in a suit told me the world holds too much danger.
There’s people unlike me, people I don’t know, people that are strangers.
So if I’m the good guy, then that must mean these people are the bad.
Otherwise I’d be the bad guy and that idea is just mad.
There’s a war every day and it’s started for some freedom,
for democracy, for things you’ll take even if you don’t need ‘em.
There’s a woman with a cackle, the problems the first black president didn’t tackle
and all the ones the white ones have ignored and stored in shackles.
No apologies, acknowledgement, or recognition -
we follow drivers, but ignore ignitions.
See what I mean is, the person steering sometimes forgets
the mechanisms that allow them to get from outlet to outlet.
Without the gears, the nuts and the bolts,
the workers and the students, what would power hold?

because there's a vision in the back
of your mind.
a vision that you think you can see,
but you aren't sure.
so you ignore it,
try to look away,
get on through the day.
but still it stays
dormant
for a moment
and that's enough.