there’s something incredibly annoying about it all, this urge to be better than good enough, the columns of highlighted plans, battle strategies for a eclipse that’s unlikely to happen, picturesque visions of murky scenery; as if we’ll be here in a century or as if it will matter what lips skin eyes we had or the number we got on a test in junior year. it’s all sinking by so fast and you and i both spend the better of it worrying our insides raw and closing our eyes, preparing for the final blow – as if that hasn’t already whistled by with the christmases. they tell us to get our numbers up, they yell to have fragile figures and stand out be different, as if that’s even tangible now in this phoenix cycle where 98 percent is the new 2 percent and different is the norm so to be different would be to be the norm and all we can do is shrug our hearts up to meet their pleas. but it’s so so hard in a world where everything wrong and wicked is romanticized by screens and statistics are emphasized by angry mustachioed men from behind beautiful architecture and our skeletons groan under the weight of it all, as if as if. you and i are stuck in this fork between dusted roads and they know it, they say they were there, but how is anything the same three decades later when it’s added to this spider web of standards? so we are lost until the new sands come and when they do we will already be in the next desert over, spinning in the next yellow kaleidoscope until the day we mix with the sand ourselves; and do you see what i mean: numbers and pictures and this is our life.

A lot of time spent
having miscellaneous conversations with the air.
Even stupid questions like "how's your day" acting as if it'd give an answer, or, even more,
a whisper of inspiration
It's an obligation, or, maybe a delegation, or, a confirmation?
that we will create a masterpiece before insane peace
With a piece of our minds becoming a little less peaceful by the day.
Soon our minds will turn into violent catapults hurling out sentence after sentence making our paper bleed
                                                     Black, Blue, Red, Gray
Joining a cult created by the letters we created ourselves
falling into the abyss these stanzas and paragraphs invite us into
And don't get me wrong, it sounds terrible, but it's home.
There's no place like it.
Where these words are so much more than words,
they're family.
But frequently, we get into arguments that erupt into something sinister
and our desks become littered with papers that wilt and wither into nothing more than liters upon liters
of a type of alcoholic beverage that'll tempt us into becoming outspoken drunkards
But that's the goal:
*to be outspoken.