What am I trying to hide?
Am I a freak?
Or do I just perform the freak
These masks reflect slivers of me
A differing defense that protects the darkest parts of me
By shielding it in light
One never sees the monster
Hiding in the open
No one ever suspects that I am hiding someone
When they are staring it in the face

What part of me do each of these reflect?
Who am I?
The man who performs shards of his character,
But never the full act.

I am the Anonymous Ally
Taste me
With all the colors if the rainbow
I am not gay, straight, bi, or trans
I am just the idea
That we are all human

I am called the Goth suit
I am not a character as much as I’m armor
A suit using my darker side to shield my vulnerable core
By usurping the fashion of a subculture already too diluted
The flames crawl from the ground
Feeding on my poisoned heart
Subliming into scarlet remorse leaking from my eyes

I am Broken Promises
Wrapped in the discarded and forgotten relics of lovers past
Much like they discarded and forgot me
The heart never forgets
It just scars over
And now I’ve created this character I can’t get away from

I am the Leprechaun
A caricature of a culture I do not participate in
But am suspiciously genetically a part of
I am American, diluted Irish sprinkled with Scottish and German
And I don’t even know that
Pass me another drink
****, I hate beer
I’ll be sleeping it off in the tent
Then disappear

I am the Clark Kent mask
Call them hipster glasses if you will
I came to them on my own as a way to soften the blow of my intensity to the public. These glasses hide a super man.
Or maybe, just a bizarro.
I look where others are blind
I perceive what goes unnoticed
Appearances deceive
And I’ve tricked you into seeing into the real man’s eyes

I, I am the Chaos Lantern
Chaos is the natural state of the universe.
There are no rules,
No laws that were not meant to be broken.
Change and flux are the lifeblood of the universe
I, I will restore it to its former glory.
Anything is possible at any time for no reason

I am Mirrors and Gears
I am the human mind wearing the man
Reflections of energy
Moved by an ancient machine
Shattered by each new branching neuron
Pushed ever forward into a pointless oblivion
A spider web of pieces that eventually consume themselves
I am a paradox.
I see the world as color and feeling, fire and ice, machine and nature, reflections and shards, darkness and light.

I am the Manic Hammer
The moment you put a barrier on something
Is the moment you create an obsession to break it
This is my tangible fight for control over the anger
By succumbing to it
I am the rage given form
The unjustified hammer of indignity
And pure primal power

I will violently and passionately take revenge on the world for the sin of my birth
I will give so much of myself to the quest that nothing of the man will be left
In the end, the man will become the journey
I am full of all of the evils in the world
Just waiting to see how many people open me

I am The DestructiKing
The ultimate evolution
When the hammer falls
Into regal splendor
And Rage gives way to hope

I am just a man appropriating another culture
A name does not exist for me yet
My process is like a quilt
I fabricate each part piece by piece
Then painstakingly (painfully) stitch them together
For now I am just a collection of past fashion faux-pauxs
A remake of a shell I used to be

I am the Box Man
A walking, blank picket sign
For a protest with no purpose
Righteous indignation and class warfare
A rebel without a cause
And plenty of cause for alarm

I am Anonymous America
I’m not fully me
I am a merging of several different people
Conflicting ideas and injustices merged into a formless identity
The American Dream
Merged with the Nightmare
Neither, not sure of what they mean

I am Blue Collar
***** jeans and Blue name tag
Swearing my way through tedious, 10 hour shifts
Earning my right to drink like a man

I am White Collar
A silk noose around my neck
A keyboard eroding my fingertips
Earning my right to Caucasian entitlement

I am Gray collar
Busting my *** one minute
Sitting on it the next
Being told what to do
While barking out commands to others
***** jeans
Over a starched polo
Earning my right to an identity crisis

I am a student
In an academic stupor hangover
Cramming facts and figures
Crunching deadlines
And lamenting the pains as my mind expands
Forced against the bubble of its previous limiting confinement

I am an Acolyte of the Covenant of Primus
I am more than meets the eye
A real person in disguise
Watch me transform into something beautiful
I am trying on religion
With the only thing I’ve ever worshipped
The fantasies of childhood

I am the Jesus of the Junk
Garbage comes to me and through me is redeemed and reborn
I feed off our throwaway society
Your trash is not only treasure
It’s my sustenance
You may see garbage
I see endless possibilities
I walk on the fetid waters of our decadence

I am the AntiFather
A contradiction in terms
A childish babble
It is not my job to be the God Father
I will not remake you in my image
I will wear, and shape, and polish, and break you
Into a man better than this false idol
The Father is fallible, mortal, and full of sin

I am the Phoenix
I am fire, passion, energy, color, light, warmth, and volatility.
It started with a broken heart.
Through the crack seeped liquid fire.
Burned away all that I was.
Purified me
Boiled me down
And rebuilt me.
From the ashes rose a better, broken man.

I am Ryan and Lisa
Two hearts merged into one
All twisted into each other
Until only the twist is left
When they eventually unravel
Neither could ever be called whole again

I am the Jail Baby
A helpless coincidence of accidents
Born incarcerated
Forever trying to be free
A double helix chain, shackling me to a broken past,
Keeps me tied to my bars

We are the Amalgams
The point in which the flux of personal identity converges
Different pieces of each mask,
Fragmented, devastated, shattered, stitched, traumatized, and melded
We merge, we flow, and flux
Always the river
Never the same river twice

I am a schizophrenic collection of ideas given form
Some halfway
Others still growing
I am one that exists as many
An imagined multiverse constantly crashing into each other
The broken mirror reflecting all the possibilities
Perceived through incoherent, skewed symbolism
A lens of light, color, and cyphers
It’s my mind that fractures
And births my many selves
I am an amalgam of brilliant and idiotic moments in constant flux

Art is the process of Destruction
Take it apart
Distill the remnants to their core essence
Then remake them in your own image

I am my layers.
We are all one
Each a piece of the other
We are Ryan