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Michael Shepherd Jan 2014
i first decipher
then transmit like a strumming messiah
wasn't i an emissary of dancing pianos a moment ago
i wish for free will
some dumb sounds keep me reverberating
and i think my subwoofer aches when i have to play screamo
i'm thirsty here
a maze of wires screaming for peripeteia
why must selfsame songs ceaselessly flow
how about something more ill
some sick stuff keeps me entertaining
the endless crowds the endless - wait, where'd they go?
oh, i was thirsty for sweat
and when you leave the room
just try to convince yourself
that i don't still boom
Michael Shepherd Jan 2014
Ethereal. That's the squirming quality of that health-hazard house,
where a byproduct of divorce emulsion slept in a bare room on
a bare air mattress, vacuously lying around with the blinds down,
vicious AM radio mumbling through the walls. Homeschooling was more like
becoming housebroken, given that my social network consisted of thirty feral cats.
I suppose some boys require a deadbolt on their room's door.

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame.

The apathy cloud that crawled the house led to a
(the deadbolt was to lock me out of my room; not in)
prison break; I awkwardly assured myself that I would
never be anything if I was still Pinocchio, and pleaded
to go to liberal-dominated-non-Rush-Limbaugh-approved public schools.
I did; I got into university, I got a grant, I do research,
I got a job, I got a girl, I got a job, I got a girl...
I don't know how to leave my room now that I'm free.
I still hear the crackle of conversative talk radio.

'Cause we'll put a boot in your *** / It's the American way.

Like trembling flotsam I drift into every class,
every party, every... A poem can regurgitate a person who is all
covered in spit and acid and memories. I still know that house
better than I know my own breathing body. I'm just going to keep running;
like a yellowed refrigerator housing second-amendment-upbringing-coleslaw;
like an overheating computer; like I always do; statically, in stasis.

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame.

— The End —