The remember the child
The shy mama’s boy in glasses
Now, with your tattoos, and curses, and **** burns
Scarred by the sins of rage’s past

You are what I could have become
I love you, my brother
But I hate the monster you’ve become
The one I feel inside me when I look at you

How much I could be like you

This waste ****** me off
Squandering your gifts
God ******, You could be so much more than this broken child
Whose cracks bleed the same blood
And shards reflect the same glow
So different,
Yet so much like me
That it infuriates me

And that wife, you ungrateful *******
Who tolerates, worships you
Brushes off your crumbs
You treat her like ****
And **** on her love
While I worshiped mine
And she betrayed my heart
Choosing money over love

I am really tired of having to prove that I am the good son
Brother
by Ryan P. Kinney

The remember the child
The shy mama’s boy in glasses
Now, with your tattoos, and curses, and **** burns
Scarred by the sins of rage’s past

You are what I could have become
I love you, my brother
But I hate the monster you’ve become
The one I feel inside me when I look at you

How much I could be like you

This waste ****** me off
Squandering your gifts
God ******, You could be so much more than this broken child
Whose cracks bleed the same blood
And shards reflect the same glow
So different,
Yet so much like me
That it infuriates me

And that wife, you ungrateful *******
Who tolerates, worships you
Brushes off your crumbs
You treat her like ****
And **** on her love
While I worshipped mine
And she betrayed my heart
Choosing money over love

I am really tired of having to prove that I am the good son

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

by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle

It began with a wail
“Bring the Hammer. Bring the Rage.”
And with a boom, smash,
A few cuts, bruises, burns, and scars,
We forged our lives

Together we were an alloy of absolute, disheveled chaos
A folded steel of unstoppable imperfections
Clean, because we knew how to get *****
Stronger, because of our magnificent flaws
Pure, because of our willingness to flaunt our impurities

Our emotions boiled to extremes
Represented as terrifying visages of paint, mud, blood, dye, and pieces of glass
Peppering our bodies as proof that we can feel
So real, so raw, so unlike the mundane, moderate identities we are forced to live
That no one passes without gawking in amazement and terror
Our mild manners are just masks for our superhuman madness

The rage comes and flows through us
Fills us
Finally with a conduit
An exit strategy
In the effigies of our commodified existence
They crack with the spider web of safety glass
Explode into splinters and shards
And trail across the sky in a dance of magnetic iron oxide

We are twisted and mangled and sick
Mangled into some image of another
Twisted in the rubber band tension just moments before it snaps
And sick of being told not to feel

We broke who we were to make who we will be
The endless shells of molds fractured
Shatters like our porcelain dreams
Their shards still present in our skin years later

We destroyed what held us back
Or held us in
The prisoners using their own shackles,
And bodies as weapons against their inanimate jailers

Like the flowers that bloom from the blood-soaked battlefield
Where the shattered pieces of glass become the strands of horse hair on an artist's brush,
Where the pigments of blood and paint are intertwined onto the canvas of a mad artist's carousel
of orchestrated mayhem.
The American Dream is a shattered amalgam of trading people for things
Experiences, for proof of them

We will clear away the rubble of ourselves
Move away from the pieces that hold us back
And forge ahead with the fury of an exploding gas tank

When the sun goes down
And the flames go up
We will finally break
The last dismantled icon of glass, plastic, electrons, and lies
This will be an end
There will be no more funeral processions
No more grave markers
We mourn our lives no longer
There will only be rebirth
A beautiful emotional breakdown
Where rage finally gives way to hope
Witness the fall of a man
A property, a thing
This will be our legacy of beautiful destruction
One last time
Then we will pick up the pieces
And build the rest of our lives

by Ryan P. Kinney

Assembled from works by J.M. Romig and Ryan P. Kinney

Once you log into The Network, you can't log off.
Once you're plugged in, you can't opt out.
That's the way things are.
Your life becomes your Channel.
Your world becomes your Show.
Have you seen the latest episode of Walking Dead or Breaking Bad?
Have you looked in the mirror?
Reality shows?
Who’s reality?

We live in the information age
Full disclosure is no longer optional
We are sharing information.
We are contributing to the death of the self.
Or are we finally mastering intelligence?
We know how to play the system
how to get followers,
when to drop a hashtag,
when to upsell a sponsor,
We are social creatures
And social control is how you keep the pigs in their pen
Until it’s time to offer us up as sacrifice at the altar of decadence
The Rich are locked up
in their floating wi-fi enabled panic rooms,
High above all of the pollution.
Living vicariously through the shows
broadcast by The Network.
Sell me another artificially derived addiction
Masquerading as sustenance
Tell me how much I need it
Need you
Preach it with the fear of the unorthodox on Fox News

Meanwhile on the ground,
people are caricatures of themselves -
the byproduct of generations
of narcissism as survival mechanism.
Nostalgia, and criticism
as a means to pay the bills.
Unless you choose to never log in.
Choose to ignore the cameras
following everyone everywhere
You can always get a real job -
If you can find one.
Most people don't.
It's the new economy.
In exchange for our data, and privacy,
we get ad-revenue and a chance at stardom.
We willingly give them our intelligence
Our spirit
For another video game
Another TV show
That promises a better reality
See it all in HD
While we dubstep to our doom
Up Jacob’s Ladder
Built out of the 15 minute prophets

We’ve traded a heartbeat for an electronic pulse.
Blips and bleeps in an imagined humanity.
Forgetting that living means leaving the house.
When the feed is quiet -
we take the occasional moment
to breathe – cough -
and look up to where all the stars used to be.

Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions

by Dawn Richardson and Tiffany Ann Boyd

Assembled from works by J.M. Romig, Sheena Zilla, and Ryan P. Kinney

My first memory is of dying.
I felt like I’d lived a full life
And now I was gladly fading away.
My first last words were
“Tell Elizabeth I love her”
I don’t remember knowing Elizabeth.
I love her though, or at least I did in that moment.

“These aren’t sad tears I’m crying, I’m just cutting onions my dear.”
It makes me want to rip off my flesh and run down the street as bare muscle and bone screaming ****** ******.
It will get better once I leave this purgatory waiting room of stress and self-loathing, but until then my outlook is a bit glum.

I am terrified
Before me is a discolored, screaming, clawing, misshapen alien creature
My son takes his first breathes of real air
We are all exhausted
His mother looks at me with a look that practically screams,
“We did it.”
I plead, “But we’re not done doing it yet…
Are we?”
His gurgles turn into cries
And I know…

For some reason, couldn’t tell you why, I thought about Frankenstein’s Monster.

Some parts are really fuzzy,
I hold it close to me- the fuzzy parts against my skin.
It’s a quilt blanket, stitched together of pieces and parts of found cloth.
My father made it for me.
My very last birthday gift.
I cocoon myself in it like a womb.

I hated him for what he’d done, but I hated myself more for missing him.
I have to fight everyday to be a better person in spite of what I was exposed to.

Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions

By Ryan P. Kinney and Dawn Richardson

Assembled from works by Ryan P. Kinney

This one’s for those who have let me down
Disappointed me, failed me
Failed to live to their potential
This one’s for EVERYONE

We will be naked and bare
Ugly and beautiful
Out from under the covers
Out of control
And into the light

There will be no more hiding
Not from the rhetoric
Not from the self-righteousness
Not from the lies we tell ourselves

This one’s for every woman who didn’t love me
And for every one that ever did
This one’s for every person who has ever doubted and underestimated me
For those who ever thought my life should be a mirror of their journey
‘Cause theirs worked out SO well for them

Not from the us that never was
Not from our definitions of family or love

This one’s for me
For not living up to my own potential

This one’s for those who patronize my intelligence
But yet are so easily fooled into acceptance
With a pair of plastic black frames
This one’s for IRONY

Not from the guilt
Not from the pain
Or from the shame
Not from the anger
Or the happiness

This one’s for who I AM


Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions

By Brittainy Kasunic
Assembled from works by Sheena Zilla and J.M. Romig

I left you
scrambled on the wall
naked for all to see

Even in this rare moment of content
He feels a wave of manic energy
On the horizon
Rushing toward him like a bullet train
And his muscles tense
In anticipation

“Good girl”
Shadow dropped the bone at my feet.
I picked it up and tossed it back into the endless grass
As it spun like boomerang in the air –

These relics, tokens of breath taken,
Remind me to keep in mind the person I will become.


Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions