Every time someone
Tells me that they
Know what it feels like
It frustrates me
It feels like
No one gets it
No one really listens.

You're not like me
You have no idea what
I'm going through.

Those times
Hours, minutes
That you put in;
All that effort and energy
Wasted for nothing.

Maybe it's because
I don't see it
I don't see the pay-off.
The results seem to
Be diminished.
Finished.

It just seems useless
Worthless
Like there's no point
In telling you more.
My mind and my pride
They just shatter
Like there's no one
Holding me up
No one beside me.
My trust just vanishes.

Tiny moving parts,
A spirit of synchronicity
That I had ruminated on:
How it starts,
And they stop
Wrought of genius
And simplicity
The dawn and fall of humankind
All seated on a wrist
Swinging forward and behind
In whose fate
The hands so twist.
Dusting charcoal from glitt’ring grin
Mocking in a single prayer
Each second, loud
And growing gayer
Penitence for that second’s sin
For blank, so empty
The vessel sat
Covered, not covering,
In the grayish-black
Wasted time in unused power
The watch but looks away
Meager, sour
Persistent still
‘Till wakened by the rested hour
Where dawn illumes
The hideous sight: a failure
A void in Dis’ sweet hall
God’s hand stained in graphite
And no grace upon creation
Did any of it fall.

Two-daughters succession go astride
One hunched in apathy
The other in defeat
I could have seen beauty in progeny
Before it was
Crushed
By artificial gravity
Smelling of blood-stained pittances
And a taker’s philosophy,
Their lunch-box notions
And plastic dreams
Rattled the bars on a shopping cart.
Do they, I wonder,
Feel their ease at pain? Or luxury, woe?
Though their smiling faces
Were promised, now reach
To Paradise,
I can seem them
Crushed
Beneath them, too:
Updated, upgraded, brand-spanking new
All they ever hoped to be,
Customized
Head-to-*******-toe.

I thought at once the hands
Took hold of life
But only to loosen them
Inside the pockets:
It merely seems a bit tight today.