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 ^{(it's beta!)}

I inhabit a world

where kids burn holes

into plastic bottles

and stick metal pieces

into them so

they can use them

to smoke marijuana.

They don’t fear cancer,

they don’t fear grades,

they don’t fear anything.

I live everyday in a world

where your friend stabs you

in the leg and all your stupid

little self can say about it is,

“Leon did it.”

We’re delinquents.

We’re so angry at authority

that we light garbage cans on fire

and pull false alarms.

We’ll question them telling us

to do math problems and mix sodium

hydroxide with ammonium chloride and

telling us not to skip class

or wear our uniforms and so many more

orders and commands.

Yeah, we’ll question that authority but we’ll never ever question why we stand around the stairwell, smoke cigarettes, spend our money on drugs, idly waste our hours doing nothing in particular, and walk around with our eyes closed like we’re in a trance, like we’re living our lives awake on the outside but we’re asleep on the inside.

And he watches this go by,

never saying anything to anybody except those he trusts,

and those he trusts are like diamonds amongst coal.

With his mind half dead and his heart

locked up in an appearance jail with the rest of the nadsats.

We’ll cook up little dramas to make our lives

seem like they’re as interesting as the lives

that we drool over on television.

It’s not a mirror though, television,

no-one can have such witty, quick

conversations or crack a

joke at the perfect time and no-one fits

into the cut and paste characters that

we’re supposed to be based on.

And there are these problems called sexuality, violence, and hate

that simply can’t be found in that scripted reality.

We try to be like that world,

aspiring to an ideal that cannot be achieved.

Then there are some people who are just a little more delicate,

who just hurt more from the words that are flung like

rocks from catapults, they build up fortresses and hide

inside and don’t let anyone or anything touch them at all

because there is no other way to get by in this unkind place.

So all the cruel people who are hurting just as much

because they can’t be like the cardboard figures

adorning the walls and flashing on the holy

screen they build battering rams to break

down the fort by any means necessary.

And when someone with honest intentions, who just

wants to care about the person who’s built

the walls and battlements around themselves tries

to break down the bricks both of them just end up getting hurt.

We’ve all got these shovels and we’re digging in the dirt and grime.

Digging for treasures and the treasure is some vague, hate filled memory

of the trenches in Europe or the car bombs going off in Iraq and Israel.

In our little big world, so far detached from the real one,

with the shadows of the adults casting over us.

They preach to us proper grammar and proper manners,

proper ways to live our lives but we just wanna figure it ourselves.

They tell us to think about our futures but our

futures aren’t happening now so instead we roll joints

and put on life jackets so we don’t drown in the boredom and anxiety.

We do all the things they tell us not too just ‘cause we’ve got nothing else to do.

We’ve got no idea what we’re doing, we’ve got no idea where to go.

No idea what’s good for us and no idea what isn’t.

Some of us don’t know when to breathe and some of us

don’t know when we need to admit to ourselves that we

can’t fake like we aren’t attracted to certain things.

They’ll put us in jail for taking a spray paint to cement

or huffing aerosol or snorting cocaine or swearing at teachers

or bringing a knife to school or loitering at a playground.

Yeah, yeah. They’ll arrest us for all those things

but you’ll never get arrested tearing someone’s soul

apart with words that aren’t really just words.

Words that split the atom of emotion inside the soul

so that they and everyone who cares about them

are poisoned by the radiation.

I live in the land of waking sleepers.

I live in a world where drama is food and

we’re all lining up at the buffet.

Nobody knows what to say to each other because

nobody knows what anyone is thinking about anything at all.

It’s a maze and there’s no ending until

you’re eighteen, nineteen years old or however old.

I live in a land of waking sleepers.

I live in a world where the self always comes first

and every girl who’s addicted to ketamine

and every guy who pretends like he isn’t

gay and tries so hard to hide it are just

another two people with problems they have to

deal with themselves.

This is my existence that I question every

single day whether it’s some sick

joke that some sadistic bastard is laughing

his twisted head off about.

It’s not a joke though.

It’s reality.

It’s my reality until the angst gland in my

head is finally stabbed and deflated by the part

of me that would rather spend his time worrying

about the problems of the world then his own petty trifles.

Until that day though,

all I can do is look for the quickly thinning

but always shining idea of love that someone

with the dual purpose of making sure I find love but also

making sure I go through terrible pain to learn

the value of that love has planted in my mind.

All I can do is sit in the fortress we’ve built together

to protect ourselves from the flying spears and falling rocks

and try my hardest make sure you don’t cry yourself to sleep.