Old men fascinated by teen *****
and the hues harnessed by high school hips,
I ask you to look at something corrupted:
yourself, this town, this world.

The town's lumber supplier has died
and daughters fight over dollars.

Greasy haired women, wearing denim,
smoking menthols and bruised with cheap make-up,
stand on fractured sidewalks.

I walk, wearing a Native American-ized fleece,
the Chippewa crush their cigarettes
and blink like lizards at me
because I wear bastardization,
but wash it.

Half the town smokes,
and if you ask the pastor,
the whole town smokes
because everyone's going to hell.


All the girls read John Green
and flip the pages because it's a cheaper escape than a bus ticket.

Plato said that everything changes
and nothing stands still;
these people will suffer,
their bodies will break down,
and they will die --
but what never changes is their hope
in eventual death.

What cannot change is my hope
in something more.

Tortured people tell themselves the past never happened.
They sit and reminisce about memories that they created.

Their hands are brown and worn down,
looking like a sibling of the ground that will eventually be a tomb for their bodies.

The teeth are fake and so are the smiles.
Hair falls off like rusty leaves brushed by a breeze, warning of the death of winter.
Limbs turn into string, ******* hang, and guts grow; like pregnant, stray cats.

Whenever they die, their houses will be eaten by their children, and not even a piece of gristle or a picture frame will be left.

The house will be nothing but a sun-dried ribcage:
a discarded postcard with the address marked out.

The children will sit and talk of their parents, repressing the abuse and the inability to meet expectations.

The children will work in sterile cubicles, thankful that their hands will not be stamped by calluses, yet knowing their fathers would not approve.

The children will open up the dust-blanketed boxes and stare at old family pictures, not able to recognize the people who smile and have perfect posture.

The children will lay in bed with their spouses and say, to no one in particular,
'Why was it never enough?
What did I do?

Was it me?'

The children will be tortured by these words,
by lives that weren't in technicolor,
by the paranoia of being tolerated instead of liked,
by the anxiety that a paid-off house
and nice car couldn't alleviate,
by themselves.

The children will retire and will have realized that they worked their entire lives just to enjoy ten years.
Their hair follicles will let go of strands and locks,
like a dandelion being stripped by the wind.

The enamel on their teeth will corrode and, before long, they will be thankful for the sensitivity of their teeth because the coldness of senior-citizen-discounted ice cream will be one of the few things they will be able to feel, let alone put a genuine smile on their face.

They will sit on their recliners, stare at their keyboard-kissed fingers and tell themselves the past never happened.

Because that's what tortured people do.