I feel a grim satisfaction as mud splatters on my white shoes.
What an appropriate metaphor for early adulthood.

My problems are not my own.
The sociological imagination has never
seemed so applicable.
We’ve all been dosed up
On dashes of passion,
splashes of intelligence
and just enough anxiety and depression
to approach existential nihilism and
We’re fed these lies of individuality but
We Know
we are only products of our youth and culture,
ones of many in the long production line
We claim
We are Art,
but We Feel
we’re just generated from streams of code,
prepared to fight to the death for
some algorithm that doesn’t even matter
And so I protest
I can’t just be a number
I am flesh and blood,
my knees are buckling under the
weight of this artificial perfection.
I’m not just a number,
My eyes are staring at the
the marks that
determine my worth, knowing
success is my only option
i am not just a number
My sanity is sinking and
drowning and
constantly fighting to stay afloat
But I am not just a number. -
My mind tells me I’m not making it--
How are these other people making it?
I’m determining my worth
on sets of standards that are as worthy as dust
And it is with these standards i am told
I am just a number.

I feel like
I can no longer speak
because I’ve been
shouting
at the top of my lungs
I AM NOT JUST A NUMBER

But my voice
is too quiet
And the world
is too loud.

I’m so tired of trying to be heard.
Yet these words still sound better
when I scream them,
not just scrawl them down
on scraps of paper.


for someone so happy
I'm so very angry.
for someone so happy
I'm so very sad.