I believe that I am capable of anything.
I believe I am great.
I know that greatness is a part of me.
Liar.
I'm a ******* liar, is what I am.
Nearly thirty years I've done nothing
with all I've been given.
I'm overweight, I'm lost, I'm a giant of misplaced ego.
I am so ******* tired of being so ******* poor.
I am sick of living in a rut
and knowing--
In my ******* bones, knowing--
that I'm the only person who can pull me out.

I remember being young, sitting cross-legged
in your living room as you watched scary movies,
through your fingers as always.
I remember being brave and strong.
I cannot reconcile the me, sitting beside you,
trying to lend you my courage,
with me, balding and fat and constantly afraid of failure.

I recall my--
Pathetic!--
schoolboy flirtations with greatness.
I remember the adulation from my peers.
Liar, I remember the adulation from the peers
I picked.
The ones I decided to be around.

I am poor, and tired. I am beat down by the
riots and the killings
and the people running my country into the ground,
with my knowing--
in my bones, knowing--
consent.

I don't want to be great anymore.
I'd settle for good.
I could be good, I think.
Liar.
I hope.
They aren't mutually exclusive,
like I thought they were,
sitting cross-legged in your living room.

I whisper a truth to myself, now,
across years, across my lifetime,
"You would trade good, you liar.
You would trade good for remembered.
You would trade good for Great. And you know it."

And ******* my lying eyes, I do know it.
In my ******* bones, I know it.

Tired and beaten.
Clothes ragged and moth eaten.
Trudging the last few sad and broken miles
crushing the disappointment of our lifetime of trials.
And a whole world for a bit of rest!
Bunched up sheets and pillows our nest.
Age may serve to wash away our rage...
But it's still a tear soaked journey to the grave.

She stands on mountain tops and old lofts
and buildings that reach steel toward the sky.
From here there is perspective,
if you want to call it that,
A certain willingness to fear.
And she soars on scary because
the butterflies feel like dying
and nothing has ever made her feel
more alive.

She packed a hundred regrets
into the lifetime of one.
And they ran from her then,
because they were new and grown.
She called after them as they flew.
She tried to run them down. But the clouds kept them.
And she was without.

She would trade the ******* world to fly.
And who wouldn't?

Where has the wonder gone? Where now is our youth?
She tried to trap it and keep it and learned the only truth.
She couldn't hold it any longer.
If only she were stronger.
But darkness doesn't need to blink.
All we do is wait and worry and think.

She tried, for a time, to sleep forever.
In dreams seeing things that awake she had missed.
She spun the clock hands backward
a hundred thousand times.
It never came back though.
She'd missed it and she cried.

She'd trade her ******* soul to make it right.
But she can't....


....Try as she might.

Baltimore holds its breath.
It's the morning after.
It's Day One.
We are brought curfews,
we are told that they wished to destroy us.
There are soldiers standing on our streets.
We are not sure if we're safe.
We're not sure if we'll ever live it down.

Baltimore: (Noun) 1. A city in Maryland.
                                 2. Slang for Riot.

We're anxious.
Because it's over(?)
We are proud.
Because it's all we have left.

We cannot let this be a sad chapter!
We have to make something good come from this!
We have to get up,
dust ourselves off
and stand up.
We have to finally embrace the conversation
that we refuse to have.

They burned us!
******* it! They burned us All!
The implications reach beyond
the city boundaries.
This can't end on Pratt or on Gay Street.
This can't end with barricaded Police stations
and tanks on our streets.

We need to discuss this.
People burned down their own home.
This is worth discussing.

Our lungs ache with effort.
Our minds race with possibility.
Our hearts long for hope.
Baltimore holds its breath.

My City is on Fire.
What do I do?
It did not creep.
It did not descend.
It Erupted.
Exploded.

My City is on Fire.
Intersections are blocked and streets are closed.
Barricades of men and women behind shields
occupy my home.
City hall is silence as the panic spreads.
Spreads with the fire and the noise.
Because once the sun goes down...
******* it all! Once that sun goes down!

My City is on Fire!
Protest turned to looting,
looting, in turn, to riot.
RIOT!
Of course they riot. Of course.
We are disenfranchised, obfuscated, beaten down.
Ignored.
God, if only we were ignored...

My City is on Fire.
It is a war zone of forgotten intentions and over reactions.
Like calls to like.
And we are so ******* human
we know only to answer violence with more.
More and more and more.
And what does it solve?
Nothing! They shout.
Their limbs lick with flame and mouths full of blood,
of hate.
And they know, in that moment, Nothing.
My city is on fire
and they would have it be for nothing.
Mean nothing.

Listen!  A struggle is proud, noble.
A struggle is worth it
A struggle is NOT a fight.
Disown that idea. Throw it from you.
Do not join the fight.
Do not join the riot.
STOP!!

My City is on Fire.
But my words are a whisper
against the shouting.
They are nothing against the violence.
Nothing.
What do I do?
Turn your pleas for help on the world.
Shout for change as messages
carried as updates
Through Trending Hashtags,
and Status Updates.
What else can we do?

@Baltimore: Help is on the way! #Baltimoreburning

My City is on Fire.
Get the word out.
People should know.
Need to know.
The world needs to see it
if they're going to join us.
If they're going to help us fix it.
My city is Burning, world.
We can't let it be for Nothing.

I see my city from a distance,
small points of light inscribe
the shapes of it's skyline against
a dark blue and purple night
and I know I am near home.
I lead a tired life
in ratty sneakers
and find myself on Pratt Street
well after the bars have closed
but before the sun.
I walk these streets and think
about the years of pavement
under my feet and the
people who populate my memories
and my city.
There are lives, being lead
in the quiet and ignored way
that city lives are,
behind every lit window.
My city isn't defined by
the height of it's buildings
and there is little neon,
but if you are very silent,
and more than a little patient,
you can hear her breathe.
My city is a portrait,
from Monument to Key Highway
and all points around and between.
I stand, in the stillness of the
streets well after the bars close,
and know that my story
has been played at different
points throughout her heaving mass.
And it is played now, by me and
the many millions like me.
We are a city united in our mutual
distaste and love for the buildings
and lights and cross streets
that house us and are our
home.

She would rub her feet,
in socks alone,
across the carpet.
She would carefully touch
nothing on her way out,
or at school.
Then she would reach out to him.

She had heard the myths
about love at first sight.
About a bolt of electricity
passing from one person
to another.
She tried so hard to recreate it.
To fake it.

Years later she would stare
out at the city from her
apartment and wonder
what tomorrow would bring.
She had become part
of a system that ignored her,
but she was used to that kind
of system.

At night she would write.
Fiction her plaything.
She would write stories
but she didn't let people
read them, because they
couldn't know that, this too,
was a part of who she was.

She had learned that
other people killed dreams.
With countless kindness.
They would talk about
how talented she was
until she felt confident.
But never confident enough
to show a publisher.
She liked her audience small
and appreciative.

Later still she would look
back on her life and wonder
what would happen if she
stood up and took the
chance.
Could she have moved,
with just her words,
other people to see her?

Could she have been
electricity?
Her thoughts,
her words,
moving from her
to another,
like love.

Push the ignition on
this endless waiting.
Find the purpose behind
hours of need
with zero payoff.
Find the taxes gone
and the bills paid
and the paycheck empty
and count it another in
a long line of the very
same day.

Post your feelings across
the void and hope
a voice calls back in text.
Because gone are the days
when we could stand
for things and let ourselves
cry out loud enough to be
heard.

Gone is the moment when
the method was undecided
and the purpose grand.
Oh, we know just how to do it,
but our causes have shrunk.
Rebuilding a word with lines
of code
and the promises stolen from us
by three generations
of people who meant well
but delivered chaos and grinning
apathy.

We were great once,
I hear it all the time.
But with the buildings coming down
and the march of what
we can no longer call
progress,
I'm finding a disturbing lack
of evidence that
we were ever more than
what little we are.

Our voices have been caged
by the the things that were
meant to broadcast them.
We have been silenced by
the application of free thought.
Is there irony in that?
Or is it just another sad reminder
of how we destroy beautiful things
because we fail, time and again,
to recognize our potential?

It's the waiting that does me in.
It's this day by day
same old same old
that has it's hooks in me.
I'm a generation trained to
be delivered up what I need.
I want to call out a battle cry
and propel us toward the ill defined
"great" we could be.
But my generation doesn't have
a voice.
We only just barely have a name.