I must learn happiness
Lest she leave me
To mine own devices
Which have decayed in woe

Do you ever lie in darkness,
Wondering if you will be
The star of some great epoch
In books of history?

Do you ever fear you'll fail,
And let everyone down
That expected you to be someone,
Instead of to be drowned?

There are so many expectations
For you to change the world
To deny is to refuse
Your duty.

There are people who are for no one,
For whom there is no one.
They are two sides of a circle.

The first is clad in shadow-black,
Who sails down a river of blood,
Deeper still, never glancing back.

The second, alabaster white,
Who watches over life and love,
A justice bitter as winter's bite.

Dorito chips and mountain dew,
The bread and butter of our youth,

Kino Der Toten,
Where the strange portal lays,
Black Ops Zombies,
I'd play to the end of days.

Rude-awakened, bare, I plunged
the mine for errors—yelled revisions
up the shaft, felt echoes drift.
Stifled gold-myths for anchors: pig-iron
chained to answers. Asked "which way?"
and felt novel paths fade to gray,
gut-checked at gates Now Boarding,
urgency-alive, departure day.  

For-Shame walks hard his two-block beat:
the love against his feet, the bleach
behind his eyes. The toll is lucid blood:
much thinner, quick-twitch coded,
primed to run. Canaries, fathoms down,
sing longing to the mask
that votes for trade—sweeps laurel off
the heads of state, befouls the learners'
****-grounds. What truth might Satan

still confound? Denounced and parceled,
grifters spend our last resort
up paper-trails that track too short—
force every sense through that
accursed mask.
To breathe, perchance, to ask.