i lost my innocence when i began to believe **** was superior to ***:
reliable, constant, and emotionless.

i lost my control when i realized i was getting high to calm my anxiety and tempt sleep rather than have fun.

i lost my sanity when i convinced myself my problems were too trivial to express and so i dismissed them to the farthest recesses of my brain.

i lost my integrity when i started viewing myself as a sequence of numbers and statistics and measurements that never quite seemed to add up.

i lost you when you went looking for yourself. you were the only one who kept me balanced and now

                                                 i have tipped the scales completely. i have rejected humanity with all their useless emotions and inevitable flaws, falling into a senseless and seamless abyss that i do not know how to escape from.

i have lost myself.






i am gone.

Trees of emerald and expectations,
taking root in dirt and damnation,
grow fruits flowing full of flirtation.

Children complain of chapped lips,
clinging to women's waning hips
as drunkards are in dire need of one last fix.

Suffering stomachs grumble
and morose mouths mumble
of a society that continues to crumble:

Demanding water of a well they dried,
without any tears, the people cried
for their way of life had died

in a world governed by greed,
while the people bleed
blood of toil and seed.

But power is now paper green,
and the forlorn farms stay pristine
while the people are lying in between
dying
and
death.

A single light
fractured into a billion shards
of bright white energy

fall like raindrops of
golden emotion to the
Earth.

All things under the sun,
sewn of the same silk and
molded of the same clay.

All pumping life
through roots embedded
in soft flesh.

Consecrating acts of love,
hate, and whim for they all flow
from the same spring,

reveling in the fact
that one exists exactly as
nature intended.

Running,

running away from the present moment in time
because you know the minute your feet
stop pounding the dirt below you
you have succumbed to the belief
that the moment snapping at your heels
is the last moment you will ever have.

Fear,

fear is the air you breathe, the blood
pumping through your veins, pulsating
at your temples, the only thing that
is keeping you alive. Fear that fear
is only temporary, a fleeting spark,
a false and empty hope.

Numb,

numb as your mind has disconnected itself
from your body, has shed its shield of thought
and is now an open soar of raw and exposed emotion.
but as long you keep running, keep
moving, you manage to avoid the eminent truth
that you are only prolonging the inevitable.

But until then,

you fly with the quickness of panic and denial,
because there is no escape but ultimate surrender.

Freedom, unadulterated freedom.
Freedom to dig little toes in the sand and run as naked and
as wild as the wind.

A freedom so complete and vast and uncensored
that it weighs like chains,
and chokes like an iron grip.

And so little hands meld mismatched links of their own,
rules and laws, and should's and should-not's,
tying little feet back to earth,
away from the suffocating sky of infinite possibilities.

Little hearts yearn for shackles,
feeling utterly exposed without them,
for a free body is one that tempts oppressors
unless he dons crude metal adornments of his own.

And so with the imprint of unsung lullabies
floating in the night air, little cheeks
nuzzle their iron blankies and doze off
under the familiar weight of confines and conformity.

The alcohol that you measure in your graduated cylinder  
is not the alcohol you binge drink on the weekends,
is not the alcohol your parents drink out of elegant crystal,
but they all burn.

Burn like the knowledge that knowledge gets you swallowed into the abyss of faceless statistics only to fill up the remaining desks left by those who care too much not to.

Life is too short to worry about why 1, 2, 3 has turned into your abc's while life screams just shut your textbook, please. There's love, and ***, and drugs just waiting for you to realize that school rots the brain, not Mary Jane.

But Mary Jane still sits with her nose in a book, knowing life doesn't end when the graduation caps fly up,
                                                           up,                    
                                         ­                        up to the top of her class, because money may not buy happiness but without a solid education financial stability is a joke, and it's a matter of time before you crash and burn,
                                                                ­          burn like the alcohol in your red solo cup, chugging away the inevitable:
                        life is wasted by the try-hards and the try-nots.

The geeks and the nerds whose potential is squandered by the system, teaching them how to read rubrics and recite rhymes and reiterate the same ******* spoon-fed to them by those who failed to exceed to the limitations of the textbook.

The hippies, the druggies, the ones who can be found in the dark hallways and back rooms and hugging the outside walls all see the futility in it all. so why not jump out of an airplane without a parachute because each joint only lasts a few puffs, and the high only a few short blinks until you are thrown back down to earth.

High school reveals how you will survive life: in one impetuous bright burst or one prolonged apathetic smolder. But all the blazers and all the late-night homework-doers will have to put out the flame or turn off the light sooner or later.

My hunger pains lull me to sleep;

they scream victory.