I said once this place was where dreams came to die,
So why am I happy here?

I can see the years etched into these peoples faces,
On line for every life they should have lived but didn’t.
Creased skin coating arthritic bone;
Comatosed souls in caracasses.

Defiant if not alive.

Because there’s not an eye that doesn’t glisten with mischief in this prison.
Solidarity and laughter while we peel back the skin on our knuckles and chip away bone.

As though the blue plasters can patch up the damage from years where it didn’t trickle down.

Alfred Edward Housman wrote about this county from London,
we smoke pipes and drink pints to honour the scholar's story,
which can be checked out the library, former learning quarters
of an explorer named Charles Darwin, who sits in grey outside,
despite leaving town in adolescence, returning from Galapagos
to The Mount, where my parents met in mental health sickness,
gave life to an original species that theories would have hated,
like Robert Clive, who earned his knighthood by looting India,
cried in parliament, now we want his stage ousted, his house is
next to the cottage where I sleep restless because myself and
a few other Shropshire lads failed to escape, even after studying
centurion debates, athletic form and getting serenaded by greats,
where are the names of those who rose from minimum wage?

My theory was written on the other side of town.
Eyes that had only watched the world through
a single pane of glass, found reflections all round.
Where I used to see grey, crisp formations of cloud.
Even in the house, blocks of door painted one colour
were replaced with dreamlike figures cutting cake.

Anyway, yesterday a man wearing a Union Jack
flag on his waist and sleeve told me his worries.
Five or six cars parked, eight or nine bedrooms
lying cold and lonely while in the south of France.
To lose count of the windows in one's life, I thought,
as he asked me about the proletariat. Luxury indeed.

Let's take a dive through my home estate,
a place I've tried to escape since my first brainwave.
I'll show you flat roofs and wayward avenues,
shopping trolleys that become steeds at two in the morning
next to mowed down greenery lying abandoned due to overuse.
I used to deliver newspapers along this route.
This spot, right here, has a great Wrekin view.
Back in my youth, it reminded me of you -
new roads, new horizons, new people to meet.
Let's keep moving to the end of the street
where a house is sent letters from the wicked government,
asking a mother if she's recovered from her own ill head.
Like her bed is four-poster when she can barely pay rent.
Her pathway displays a name written in cement.
Our descent continues with the drop-offs at Maccies.
A clock towers over us while we're waiting for taxis
to take us out of this place and onto higher plains
with house party nights and endless summer days.
But our dreams remain chained like bicycle frames,
The keys are locked away, we pray
in cars under stars, they say
we can be anything we want to be.
Such as royalty, or prime minister of this great country,
if we work as hard as anyone who's born into money.
So we hunt for hidden weaponry, hoping they see our cannon fire
and where spirits only fade, there will one day be a parade.

i never bought the whole dark academia thing.
sure, ****** and drugs and *** are torrid and dark when you're from a rich family,
when you've never woken up to the news of your childhood best friend being shot to death,
when you haven't seen your family and friends fall into the seductive cesspool of opioid addiction,
when half of your class was pregnant by the time senior year rolled around.
the academic upper class thinks what working class kids go through is sexier when the backdrop of the overdose is chandeliers and silk,
instead of a small town parking lot at 3am.
my aesthetic reality of academia is scholarships, it's leather jackets and nicotine addictions
it's having the only fifteen-year-old car in the campus parking lot and hoping to find a plug before the first week of classes.
it's not sleeping between work and class and partying. it's being the only one whose dad isn't buddies with the guy giving me an internship.
it's lonely. it's the crippling loneliness of not understanding upper class social cues,
it's reading crime and punishment in the slivers of time between work and work and class and more work
and emphasizing with raskalnikov so much it makes your teeth ache.
it's coughing up blood.
it's having health insurance for the first time in college and still not using it.
it's drowning, it's fighting, it's violent and heroic and painful and
never knowing
if you'll actually
make it.

Sa kalyeng punong puno ng dukha
Kamalayan ko'y nabubuksan na
Sikip at init ng mundong ibabaw
Dama lahat nitong pusong naligaw

Kahirpan talaga'y dapat maranasan
Bigat ng aking daigdig napapasan
Sakripisyo sa buhay, aking puhunan
Nang kasalatan nama'y mabawasan

Makita nawa ng iyong mga mata
Lahat ay may kanyakanyang suliranin
Minsa'y humihingi rin naman ng awa
Ang iyong nang hihinang mga alipin

Maglalaho sa mundo lahat ng hirap
Banggit ng mga kataastaasan,
Ngunit sa ngayon, ang tanging problema'y; aking kabuhayan.

11:57pm 11-14-18

Lingerie rustles
As hangers squeak and strain,
Sliding across the sturdy bars
That hold retail up,
Cradling profits,
Like a fistful of bills,
Illspent.
I yawn;
Exhausted by such a drearily normal moment;
A weary reminder
Of the long hours ahead of me,
And the demands of my
Ever-watchful overlords.
Still,
my mind wanders,
Thinking that perhaps sleep will come easily tonight,
Despite the wakeful rest I've found here
leaning on this
cool,
white
counter.
Perhaps it will be time to leave soon,
And reach
for the sunny skies I can see
taunting me from beyond the glass;
To leave behind this dusty,
dreaming
perspective,
And leap into adventures,
as of yet,
unknown.
I sigh,
Returned
to be merely an observer to my working hell,
An unwilling participant
To the necessary waste
of a perfect Spring day.

Exemption from passion like working with satisfaction turning the digital clock pocketed the money fits into slots opening future doors like pin ***** dots.
These calluses create tools for deranged fools to tare holes onto those that need paper the most and Ivory towers and golden harshness at birth dictate life’s glooms and hardship, whilst 2nd place in races almost always face the independent states of our minds, but the people that have less, given more will always represent respect and in our eyes.
Alas paper with faces does unfortunately dictate life’s inevitable flow in this race.

an angry argument thrown at an opponent as arrows shoot across the battlefield over an expensive bottle of Cabernet.

walls and borders mapped out in thick pencil lines, they hastily marked their territory before it all drowned in earthy blood-red.

Fresh pepper, sir?