A lab coat and a perfect life
With a perfect job
Compounding toxic chemicals
to solve a problem your gloved hands
know nothing about
Dissecting my brain
when you don’t even know my name
And I’m supposed to believe
you truly care about me
as you compact and ship these pills
to a stale pharmacy
Rattling bottles on
a cold drive home
I swallow this world you’ve created
Now I get to wait and see
what this does to me
Can it relieve this pain
or does it make it worse
You don’t care you collected
Get stalled at an intersection
Watch my hearse drive on by
with no clue you’re one
of the reasons I’m gone
Stay strong
there’s many more hearses to see
Keep making your medicine
and join the long line of the guilty

~kb

I’m laughing even though
I want to cry
but it’s like my mind
needs my body to feel happy
as the pain comes out
or I’ll break again
there’s light in these bones
I promise
but I can’t stop falling
and these fractures keep on letting it out
I’m in doubt of this life
like a mistreated wife
I just want to get out
but I need help
We’re all simply suffering
just not on the same day
so if it’s your time off
please come my way
I could use the company
and a mind that’s not mine
and when my bones start to heal
It’ll be my turn in line

~kb

I don’t emote like you
I take emotion potions
to deaden the world around me
why should anyone be subject to this
no care so no care oblivious
to the stats even though they surround you it’s a secret like I’ve
done something wrong
because my mind wants me dead
and you say it will all be ok
but no one can tell me how it will all be ok and my body is tired and frail and worn and ripping at the seams
and for someone like me it just
has to be this way
I don’t want to stay
and I can’t leave
and there’s no other options
for any reprieve
take your meds go to therapy
wait for darkness try to survive
this is your life
deal with it until the energy leaves
and it’s a stalemate with
a bed and drawn curtains
certain this is the end
and then I wake up and cycle again
and I just want to know
when I’m allowed to be too tired to go on without guilt trip songs about
how everyone hurts if I don’t anymore
but what about me
I guess I’ll take the saddened states
of everyone while I’m alive
just so they feel alright and tell me
how it will all be ok
when none of it's ever been ok

~kb

Midnight gives beauty away to the cityscape
Skyline lights not even comparable  
To the space above them
The smell of plants opening for sustenance

Clouds pour down their dismay
Flowers appear in curious places
Fill desolate places with colors of promise
A smog filled fog threatens existence
The city destroys light’s beauty once more

Start the car and drive to distant fields
Surrounded by haunted trees
bellowing as the wind picks up
Set on fire by firework skies
Cold breaths and a colder chest
Burning trees a warmth to
frozen foliage and fingers
Fixated intently on the silence
The silence of being alone with the world
Calming as an owl’s call
And the most deafening absence of the city
Hoarding sparks thrown in the trunk of the
Car to save for those cursed blocked nights

Lay back on the bathroom floor
Load hoarded stars onto a skylight
Escape the city inside pretending
This tile floor is a field fixing me to it
Cut the circuit breaker
Bathe in beams of the galaxy
City can carry on in the wake
Of this makeshift nature
It’s fluorescence isn’t welcome here

~kb

Falling over this
made up line
one way or the other has our truth covered
and smothers
the humans we were meant to be
the intelligent
the artists
the teachers and preachers
all run from the projectors
in our brains showing features
subliminally telling us we need to change
we have to fit in
normally some way
while the universe keeps sending us signals
telling us to stay the exact same way
that your cells made you
they were made to create you
the you that comes through
when you let peace preside
over your abnormal life
Society is an oblivious liar
Normal is simply
a setting on a dryer

~kb

The pain of sickness
Knows nothing of time
But it surely finds its place

Snuggles deep inside
Warm bodies to grow
Has a distinguishing distorted face

People are scared
Of pain’s vast unknowns
No desire to become educated

Ignorance drives
Their initial responses
And it’s all become antiquated

Tell people you have
A physical ailment
They are driven to empathy

Tell people you have
A mental illness
Fear drives them to entropy


~kb