This town holds secrets
Don't you know?
Between the houses and their lawns,
Between the market square and suburbs,
Between the forest and the parks.
A mystery lingers
Like unsettling fog
Suffocating, deadly, murderous.
The longing silence
That draws exhales from townsfolk.
The rolling winter
That fills their hearts with dread.
For the creatures of the mountains
Come down to the haunted town
Drawing blood on sidewalks
To satisfy their frozen hunger.
The people tape their windows
And blind themselves with scissors
For they cannot bear to see the horrors.
Each season, a part of town shrinks away
Like termites eating entire wood slowly
Devouring the taste.
Soon, it will become a ruin
Uninhabited, lost in time, lonely.
What once was the American dream
Now an urban flower in a devastating jungle.
A leftover, remnant of something great, eaten away by greed,
destroyed by self hatred.

Pragya Bhagat's Poem:
this poem isn’t an answer
it’s a question
how do we become the stories we tell ourselves
how do we become the stories we tell
how do we become the stories
how do we become
how do we
how

My response:
Answer Can Be

Or rather the stories become us
Perhaps no becoming
Perhaps they just are
As they wait for expression
Hidden beyond sight

The work is hard, but

every night we sing away --


all our tiredness.

They called her basic
As though it was such a a bad thing to be
But it was not bad at all.
For how could it be bad to like what millions like in turn?
To have something in common with those around you?
There must be something great about those things for millions to pursue them
So to the girl apologizing for her vanilla latte...
No, to be basic isn't so bad.

Without its planets
The sun is just another
Solitary star

For I found everything I needed
here in a world surrounded be me too.

Bet your life,
let it roll,
make up minds, enough to see
around mountains and across canyons,
to the future.

Right now, this now, they say
today, while it is called today,

let this mind be in you, when you
realize your truths alignments
with the fabled truth, known
to make free men,
with no fear
of death.

But the duty is daily,
wake to drift away, daily…
when you mature,
and reach your golden years,
regretless regarding wasted years,
redeemed
in flash of recognition, times change,
basic mankind mind, in  mortal form,
is good as any basic living creature's,
the empty slate
comes preloaded with how to breathe
and later auto responders add reason
with emotions, good reasons needs,
and parenting, when equipped,
is not the most important
to the civilizating decadence, which
is importing reasons,
make believe,
until lief itself is defined as doing
by
some oft referred to higher power
reader readiness,
achievement
tested annually as were we, by
now
some authority has authorized your
training in all requisite social skills,
listen, good citizen,
allow obediance as sacrifice,
by laws that allow religions
to flat out lie
about knowledge and how God,
in the Holy Bible, out
lawed it, knowledge,
full spec, pure through good
for nothin', once you know, well
you must go to hell, or learn obediance
-you just do, yep, fool's names,
and fool's faces
oft appear in public places.

Any fully Disneyified child wishes to be rich.
The moral of the whole idea, live and learn.
Property laws protect owner's rights,
renter's rights are same as always.

For all the knowledge released in my time,
non
T
most seems better never to have
held true through osmosis, pressed, ground in,
heel grinding, teeth gritting, holy I said so, by God.

'Best believe there is a Manichean Evil afoot,
a jealous God, an avenger who hates unbelievers,
and hates the child unsaved by ritual adherence

of responsible adults to the things that make
Donald Trump's version of the Master Nation

Great as it was when we went to war against
the heathen ****** alien nations,
using capitalism's enrichment paradigm,

a rising tide lifts all ships. Yep.
And drowns all ports in the resulting surgepull

Greenest summer in Greenland history, wait and see.