Tell me of all the idiosyncrasies you developed as a result of your first trauma,
and I will tell you of all the times God has let me down.
Follow me down twisting alley-ways and one way roads,
and I will deliver you upon all but salvation,
because the second-coming is still sleeping it off in an opium den.

It is a broken world and we are all broken people,
we carry our dead friends’ dead-weight as though our arms fold into graveyards,
and we cling to what we have buried, knowing not of heaven.

The back of the American Dream has been fused at the spine.
The poets are all flirting with Hemingway’s shotgun or Sylvia’s oven.
The artists have started eating their yellow paints, desperate for some sunshine,
The philosophers have all made a suicide pact and the politicians
aren’t even lying anymore.

The world is on fire and the smoke smells like used hypodermic needles and dead children.
We are all desperate for someone to take the blame, to stand up and say,
‘This blood is on my hands’,
but we are all to blame, and that’s what keeps us up at night,
wondering whose funeral we will attend next.

For every refugee child left to die in every war-torn country,
for every fentanyl patch stolen from every grandmother’s medicine cabinet,
for every peaceful protest that should have been a fucking riot,
for every phone call made just to hear the voicemail of a dead friend,
for every time we did not love well enough,
we are guilty.

I am no different,
my blood stained hands just hold the pen.
I would trade all the hope left in the world for a bottle of booze and a good night’s sleep.
I am as selfish as the next, and we are all mausoleums of failure.
So raise your white flag of defeat, put on your rose colored glasses
and hide from the truth of it all.
Skin the family cat and eat for the first time in weeks,
force feed the children Triaminic,
so someone can get some
goddamn sleep.