A nation with daddy issues
We call out- yes master
Success took a sudden left
And we've forgotten what we're after-
Because mommas got a curfew set
No matter if you're plastered
A nation founded on being a *******
Afraid of our youth
We drown it out with our laughter
As long as we fake it
It really doesn't matter.
We pledge allegiance to the mad hatter
Swallow down our issues
Call it morning after
The fact
That our hearts are in our stomachs
But our brains are intact
Securely in a system
That needs to be hacked,
We gamble our values
Betting what we lack.
The age of information:
Our odds are stacked
Up against
A doctrine that overrides
Common sense,
Pushing our past
Into present tense,
While we pry our fingers
Through the picket fence
Between our rights and wrongs
And the need to make sense
Of the corruption that places
Appearance overides the common sense
Of discrimination and ideals
That we can't fight against
Without binding ourselves
To a static defense
Where poverty and status
Don't need a pretense

I wish you would hear me when I say I've been thinking about you.
It's not enough, you say:
Your name glaring from my cellphone screen
As it writhes with the vibration of the bottomless void of empty phone calls.
I can't pick up the phone,
But I hope you can find solace that I've been thinking about you.
Star crossed lovers lament their first person plot lines until they intersect.
Between unanswered text messages and disregarded voicemails,
Juliet heaves her shoulders in between scenes
And Romeo checks his emails;
But still my mind remains undisturbed
And thinking about you.
It's not the same, you cry:
That I hide my presence,
Yet I wish you could feel the quivering waves my thoughts send out
As they bounce upon the heavy walls of your being,
Yes I know I've been away,
But I'm thinking about you:
A mantra echoed in my mind until it becomes second nature, heaving in and out in unison with my chest.

I wrote a poem with your name,
And left a lot of blanks along the way:
Subtle mannerisms meant to render delicate and absolute imagery
Drifted right out of my vocabulary,
Face to face with the other component of a lover's metaphor:
The churning azure of the ocean's ebb and flow stared hungrily at the limitless white abyss beneath its tidy line in my unfinished sonnet.
I meant to write a poem about you:
Clear and beautiful: the materialization of how love is taught to feel in the classroom,
Where Helen hangs her heavy head and stares into her doomed reflection:
The vacant space that flowers grow, between cobbled steps and naked feet.
Yet, something else has happened:
The space where your imploring image should have inspired stars to fall into the fiery depths of hades hangs indifferently above reality.
All the superfluous images crafted to allow your luminous soul to shine,
Fell flat against the darkness: the aftermath that occurred before I had any time to craft the person behind the syllables of your being.
I meant to paint your image with language synonymous to love,
But instead I pressed my face against the hand-smeared, dust-ridden, cracked open only just an inch, window of a relationship that never really was much of a novel.
The still damp with paint, folded down the middle construction paper butterfly of kindergarten art projects of love. Messy and effortless, yet containing some inevitable beauty that comes from the close and intimate fusion of two halves.
I wanted to eternalize our connection through language,
But in the process, I unraveled it and left myself vulnerable and empty across from what was once the magic I had sought to know,
Now blurred, your name conjures an ink blot that my eyes have grown so accustomed to, they can hardly make out the hidden beauty.
I meant to write a poem with your name,
Yet mine has appeared on every quivering line.
A distorted self portrait of the artist echoed in my vain attempts to personify an emotion not yet felt.
I lost you in the very language that sought to immortalize you, and found myself in the process.
Your name no longer stood for the way your eyes light up when you talk about something of importance,
Or your genuinely lopsided smile and crooked tooth,
But instead, for all of myself that hide behind the capital Y of you:
All my missed opportunities and failures materialized in a poem that wanted so effortlessly to be about Love:
The crime of understanding a person as a metaphor
Echoes soundly through the hollow horizontal lines of words
That, if you squint just so,
Look faintly like the bars on a cage
With your name looming above its pearly gates,
Tragically beautiful yet motionless and with a purpose that has no impact
Beyond the world that it lingers about, yet never really enters.

I've never felt more than half an hour:
Insomnia trickles down until the black-tar-ridden-sap oozes onto
My partially open eyes.
And, to say I've never been in love.
Emotions rise up and retreat-
A constant heaving of the battered
Chest- saving us from finding out
How frightening life is.

Murmuring our sordid laments to Lady Death,
Beneath the murky glow of hotel room bed sheets
And fluorescent dollar store night lights,
Too vacant to summon anything more than a whimper
From our submissive minds.

Nothing ends, here.
One upon another, words flow effortlessly
Out of our cavernous mouths,
Clogging our chests with empty syllables until
We forget why we ever tried to do something more
Than care.

Depression can be felt anywhere-
The air slowly seeps from the hissing
Caracas of a worn out tire,
Or the lungs of anyone
Still enough to remember.
Mindlessly chanting Hail Mary's,
We taunt time with our penchant for immortality
And hospital lobby greeting cards,
Until Aphrodite descends to sell her soul
To the highest bidder.

Mother, I have killed the world
With a time bomb that will never detonate:
Ceaselessly ticking on and on-
A reliant backdrop for something
Too harsh to exist in silence.

Our hearts have fallen from our sleeves
And into films, romance novels,
And 3am cooking infomercials.
Land of the living:
The walking dead,
The too-afraid-to-tell-you-how-I-really-feel,
The product of a broken people
Who traded silence
For a language full of mixed intention.

Children of the night,
Blindly parade around before noon,
Trying to buy redemption
At a corner store market
For half the price
Of the pulpit.

Afraid of hearing the latent echo of
Our own pulsing hearts,
We fill our lives with white noise
And intimacy, too stagnant
To exist without our 3am spirituals.
Anxiously arranging our feeble lives
Around minutes and hours-
Slaves to false agendas,
We battle the dark, secretly,
until soon
We lose sight of the purpose
And get caught up in the motion
Of a world too drugged out on
Redemption
That we forget our own names.

There isn't much to be said
About the day time-
Hour after hour, we beat on
Against the ticking clock
Of complacency,
Until before we know it-
We're ****** into the realm of
The halfway living.
Awake past midnight,
Processing the happenings
Of 9-5,
As if draging them out into
Language
Will increase their potency.

There's nothing more moving
Than yesterday,
After a night of fermenting in
Our desperate minds.
Often too late to be felt
Before 10pm.

Reality is too much with us.
Pushing up against
Our trembling palms,
As we reach out
To ******
The manufactured idea of
Happiness. Prepackaged
And with an expiration date
Beyond the next year.

We try to find our fate in tarot cards,
Palm readings, grocery market bargains, expensive haircuts where they only take an inch off but you still cry, second rate ballets and strip clubs, the words of others, and Sunday services past 12 where the hangover isn't as dreadful.
Experience junkies,
****** fiends,
Attention addicts,
Compassion parasites,
We **** the marrow from the earth
And prescribe her with Ritalin
And 3 months of sick leave-
The placebo effect has never seemed
So enticing.

Is this what it's like to talk to God?
Newspapers from last week
Find their way into the warm,
Sticky floors of the subway:
They have no purpose here
In this cool, indifferent future.
Bold headlines prophesying drought,
And lamenting those already dead,
Alongside ads for half off
A large pizza, and 25% off your biggest
Problems. Classified ads
And the sports section
Reek of ***, failure
And vulnerability-
No one cares, now.
The past is only real within the proceeding hour,
And middle school history class lessons,
Too optimistic to hold
Any reality beyond repetition.

Lifeless, we seep through time until
The pages are soaked and soggy with
Our failed ambition and twice baked
Love stories that grossed a billion dollars
For the movie theaters, gas stations and diamond companies-
Condensed into romance novels
And nonfat ice cream:
A testament to a nation
Afraid to feel anything that isn't synthesized
And discussed in tabloid magazines.

Sideline poets and actors,
We rap our knuckles raw against the railing,
Nervously counting down the seconds
Until we will be called to dutifully recite
All we know.
Waiting, we count our blessings.
The cumulation of good deads and sacrifice
That have paid the dues for a one way ticket
To the promised land.
Little children, again,
We twist the frays of our sweaters
And buckle our knees with anticipation
Of judgement day
And Memorial Day weekend.

I've never felt so cold as when you taught me how to feel-
As each stagnant second pushes
The great pulsating vibrato of life
Further and further into
Yesterday,
Until nothing is left but memories
And stale tap water in a ceramic coffee cup:
The trembling scale by which we measure happiness
That is only felt after it becomes a memory.
Who determines the expiration date
Of emotion?
Your warm pulsating skin
And the hottest month in August
Can only be felt in photo albums
And subtle murmurs only heard
Past 3am.
I never meant to get this caught up
In life-
Breathing in the bitter reality
Of fragmented testimonies
Warning me of what's to come
And fragility of time.
Selfishly I **** the marrow out of
Every fleeting moment,
Scattering the bones across the graveyard of my unrequited mind-
A self proclaimed martyr of suffering
And good intentions.
The confinement of my sordid thoughts,
Condenses reality,
Into the tangible.
Freedom is only felt
In the aftermath of an earthquake-
Crumbled barriers now bear remnants of security.
Is this how it is to feel?
The nerves in my finger tips
Are hot and trembling, as I trace the
Faded outline of something too real
To ever be strained out into the world
Of the living.
Time and time again, I remind myself
Of the ineptitude of anything
That isn't born
Within the sacred hours of
Insomnia.
A distorted image scatters across my empty mind,
Casting shadows on the times where
Nothing mattered beyond the moment.
Life breathes in and out
To the rhythm of the broken record
That we relentlessly cram
Into our vacant hearts,
As if trying to drown out the hollow drone
Of the love
Manufactured in Sunday night sitcoms and materialized on Broadway.
Simple actors, we betray our inner wishes,
And sell them in the form of words
To a greedy audience, yearning to be reassured
That they aren't the only ones who mistake pain for something
Pure.
Time and time again,
I repeat my cynical mantra
Through the motion of my feet upon the ground;
Because, history repeats himself
Until emotion can no longer tread
The freezing waters of existence,
Leaving nothing but a trace of
Something that we foolishly lament with the names of a lover,
And drape with the revealing veil of time-
Mistaken for the truth,
And worshiped at the alter of God.

Empty asphalt parking meter,
Suburban drop out,
Accidental, half baked,
She-really-didn't-mean-to-
Love story of the empty
Alleyways and crowded
Cross streets, full of sober promises
And five day old
Chewing gum
Wadded up and discarded
On the faded, cement floor.
Blood pulsating
Through fifteen dollar
Cheap leather combat boots.
The almost cold, October air
Wheezes through halfway parted
Lips and abstract fleece jackets,
Stained by yesterday
And the subtle scent of pizza sauce
Evaporated grease and
Paper thin
Apologies.
Nothing grows here,
As worn out tires skid to a stop
In front of fluorescent bank signs,
Illuminating the way
To a safe ride home
Along with a three dollar waiting fee.
Heavy upon our translucent veins,
The world pushes down onto
Our vulnerable skin:
Hold your breath,
And one-two-three,
You won't even know what hit you.
Pulsating rhythms of life
Of something like Vicodin,
But with a stronger kick-
Bloodshot,
Our eyes dart back and
Forth, until eventually they lose track
Of everything alive enough to feel it.
Vibrant shades of yellow and red,
Lose their faces within
The fogged glass of the department store
Refrigerator. Who is there
To see the transparency of
The off-brand seven up
And diet doctor pepper?
Momma, I have shied away  
From life:
A coward too preoccupied with
Monday.
Death and damsels
Pull at my indifferent coat strings,
Until all I hear is the muffled sigh
Of yesterday
And that of the tomorrow
I will never see.
Oh, twisted fate,
Don't fail me now:
Palms up, I mindlessly surrender:
Who I was
For who I will never be,
Amen to amen,
Crammed up against the scratched,
Metal lining of a transit bus
Between the middle and end
Of a crowded route-
Nothing breathes here:
Hold your seconds until
Reality pushes up and
You can heave in the polluted
Scent of half past five
And missed doctor appointments.
Neck arched back,
Life flows down my esophagus
In the vessel
Of a Benadryl
And vitamin C. It's all the same
When you've bottled up your
Emotions, and sold them for
A pretty price
To anyone poor enough to buy
Them. Leaving you with a penchant
For emptiness, and a stomach full
Of vacant ambition
Sealed to the brim by an
Extended hand, not quite close enough
To feel it.
Bang, bang,
The sound of closure haunts my every move,
Driving me closer to my final hour
And away from the one before it.
I'm no longer with you:
Practiced, proposed, rehearsed and perfected.
Life after death is an encore-
A standing ovation,
So loud
That it drowns out reality.