Middle-class, educated, better than all of you. The poet
whines that the people he said were his friends
were his friends. Too eager to stick it to the man, his sentences end
where he pleases.

Not understanding, as his peers are hurt when insulted,
he blames the age to which he was born
of his troubles. He should have been born in the fifties.
Absolutely nothing was wrong with the fifties.

Love is not a safe place. It is not the taste of their name
coughed by the cancerous lung, drowning in overused metaphors.
A lover is not a tool, to take you in and give you everything
they have, to spew a 'better' person next year.

Death is not the endless peace, nor the bliss,
nor the torture nor infinite void. It is the end, no matter
how artistically short you write each line,
and none of it mattered.