I thought I was being saved
by Peter Pan
until they evicted us
from Neverland.
We thought we could outrun
debts higher than numbers
we could count—
the bills we must pay
to Foreverland,
when childhood became some distant
part of space-time
that mocks your
hilariously brief existence,
Where life is a fluorescent-lit
doctor’s waiting room
where you twiddle your thumbs
waiting for death to get around to you.

And then there’s the fear of death,
that an optimistically counted eighty years
of ******* are annulled by the
billions of years surrounding the beginning and end
of everything in existence you will ever possibly know—
ensuring that a Nobel Prize winner and a drunk on the
street, have essentially accomplished the same ******* thing:
existence.
And so goes the life of Foreverland…

(I buried my optimism
to see what it would do—
I’ve grown no fruit
and should I be surprised
the ground’s as barren as my faith in you?
I sold it up and gave it a price—
my ignorance, my security,
And you can have the sacrifice
I make to exist in a world
I’m sure I lost everything to.
So what is it now?
What’s a mortal like me to do?)