Love and confusion confounding the illusion of trust in a systematic regime which they deny ever existed but constantly promise to improve upon. The hat's shape and color may change, but our inability to exchange their deranged platforms for a stabler form of expression exposes our disillusion with dispossession and our embracing being complacent in the face of our rulers' all-encompassing corruption.

My movements were eternally not my own
My distinctions, decisions, discrepancy,
Also not my own.
The creation or establishment of a newborn,
Covertly an awaiting infection of control and scare.
Because only a newborn had nothing to fear of this world or district.

I fear the air, the sun,
I cannot trust the outside,
I belong far from fear.  
How must I walk if it’s controlled?
Do I march or run?
Do I look up at the sky or close my eyes in terror?
Do I engulf the fear like a sharp knife or let it eat me up instead?
Not knowing will do both.

I’m writing here because it’s my own words,
Not a speech or sharing of my gospel.
It’s a sin to my kind,
But I am not like that kind.
Please allow my independence hidden,
I can't stand the scare.

In this place
The air is so dry that water sulks.
The sky is a viscous brown mosaic.
The sulfurous fumes of old suffering linger.

A woman stares as if trying to unsee creation.
Words on a man’s tongue sound
like rhythmic coughing.
At the only stoplight
the crosswalk sign flashes “Don’t waltz.”

Strangers recoil from me
as if from an embarrassing stain.

People stream to the town square
for some indecipherable ritual.
Probably a funeral for the sun
or a snake oil sale.

Welcome to humankind’s true garden.
Not paradise but a place of desolation,
and what comes after is not exile but striving
and getting the hell out.

So long, mom and dad.

I live in a town
Where the lights never go out
But the moths never come in
Because spiders are the citizens