Vanity is the killer sin of woman and man
Showing up everywhere in common day society
Magazines, books, music, and on and on and on

We are all guilty of it to some degree
From the man spraying on cologne in the attempt to get a partner
To women in talon-tipped platform heels

We have convinced our sons and daughters that beauty is something that must be manufactured
Not purposely, no! But we still have!
Not the natural ways of us human beings

Nature tells us, "Beauty shall not be messed with."
Yet that's what we keep doing!

To the brave, the bold, the foolish,
Whatever you may be
I dare you
To look beyond cultural
Social
Influences on mankind
And see that everyone is beautiful to someone in someway
And that true beauty is internal
And vanity matters not!

I'm very tired
And it's very late at night
My thoughts keep me up
It's getting harder to fight

I think about my failures
And everything I've done wrong
How I **** everything up
It's all a familiar song

My words are getting literal
I can't disguise my guilt
The hatred for myself
In every direction it's built

Well rhyming gets so hard
When I try to write my mind
Because I'm unable to find the words
That could shed light

Even without a rhyme or a rhythm I find it hard to articulate these dangerous thoughts I have. As many writers do, we have this sense of frustration because no combination of syllables can really portray the emptiness and sadness that lives in us. Styron called it "melancholia", but not even that will suffice.

I've come to the realization that
Loss is all around.
It's the down the street.
In another city.
In another state.
Or in a different country.
Or across the oceans
To a place so unfamiliar.

But not too unfamiliar,
Not unlike death.
The mysterious endings
To a person's
Being,
Seeing,
Feeling,
Dreaming.

The point at which
You stop breathing;
The final cries you hear
From your closest
Friends and family.
A permanent state of trance,
Never to take another glance.
You were one in 7.2 billion,
But now it's time for you
To float away like helium.

I feel guilty
For not feeling grief.
The sadness just isn't in me.
How can I feel for a life
I never truly knew?
Yet you seem like the only one
I ever really knew.

A family that's been struck
With the endings of a generation.
The knots of our roots
Are being tied slowly with the years.
All we can do is shed tears,
And hope we won't feel fear.

Sooner or later
The names will be unknown.

When I gave you my bracelet I told you I wore it to remind myself that most pain is self inflicted and you still have it somewhere but you haven't mentioned it in a while and it's just some safety pins hooked together so I don't really need it back and I think you need it more than I do because you named the cuts on your arms after people and you blame them on events and it seems like you've forgotten why it's called self harm you say you tried to **** yourself because of your ex girlfriend and your dad and I know this isn't what you want to hear but I'm not going to sugarcoat anything you tried to **** yourself because you overreacted to a breakup you tried to **** yourself because you made yourself believe your dad hates you you tried to **** yourself because you thought yourself into a black hole and you named it after them and now you're on the verge of doing it again but this time you're screaming my name into it and I have apologized much more than necessary even though I didn't do anything wrong and you still blame me when we're on the phone at 2am on a Monday night and I'm trying to make you feel better and you keep saying you hate yourself and I'm wondering if that's actually true because most of the time it seems like you hate the people that are trying to help you and I'm begging you to start wearing my bracelet again