What Dreams

What dreams have made me weak?

As tender darkness sweeps,

And the Sandman floats

In velvet cloak,

To snatch the day so sweet.

What night-time terrors roll,

As dreamscapes take their toll,

On tired eyes with engulfing sighs,

consuming bodies whole.

Do your nightmares overspill,

To your morning window sill,

When the sun's full blaze

Can scorch your gaze,

And taint the light that fills.

For there are monsters under your bed,

On your skin and in your head,

They crawl through epithelial cells

And coat your heart like lead.

Oh these dreams have made me weak,

They have tenderised my meat,

From break of day

To nightly fray,

They have made my visions bleak.

But there is hope here in this room,

In my quiet nightly gloom,

For even under deepest snow,

The lonely snow drop blooms.

Still I Rise

Still I Rise

Back Straight

Shoulders Back

Eyes front and centre

Body pushing forward through the bleakest of winters

Still i rise

Silence in retrograde

Loudness through forcibly closed mouths

Teeth clenched against the chatter of deafening doubt

Still i rise

Reinvention

Cut throat

Low cost

New shape, new sound, new skills

Picked from the bleached white bones of a past

So full of predictable whims

Still i rise

In progress

In search

Open handed i approach 

The single shaft of truth that will focus my attention

Turn my scattered reveries into tunnel vision

Still i rise 

I cant decline 

Can't stop the evolution 

Of the permanent impermanence of a tumultuous mind

Still i rise

Wings spread 

Head tilted

Sight shifted toward some distant greying cloud

A foggy silver lining, never daring to look down

Still i rise

Tongue tied and glistening

Wings clipped and faltering

Battle lines drawn against a world 

Always ten steps behind me

Never losing sight of the sky spread out in front of me

Trying to hold on tight but my grip is always …

… Loosening

Still i rise 

The Death Has Occurred Of Cesar Almeida

The Death Has Occurred Of Cesar Almeida

“I tell ya one thing kid, forget your cooks and seamstresses, what ye gotta do is, ya gotta find a woman who can make love like a 5th Avenue hooker, and shoot a piece as cleanly as she chops onions. Once ya do that, oh boy, ye got it made.” His New York drawl scratched its way through the mid-November air, cutting  puffs of CO2 smoke signals from meaty jowls. 

I was a misplaced teenager, full of angst and directionless anger. I was lost in the mire of adolescence. An old dog cast adrift in a sea of hungry wolf pups.  I was different from my peers. The usual trappings of youth bored me. I wasn't interested in boys, or girls for that matter, at least not yet, and everyone around me infuriated me. I felt set apart from them, as though  I were from a distant time, where vapid hackneyed cliché’s were not the currency of youth. I had nothing to offer this teenage economy, so I went to his store every day, just to hear his stories. 

 We would stand outside the front of the store, backs flush against the grimey, brown tinted glass, the street, our theatre. He would keep me enraptured with tales of the iniquitous scandals that made up the daily bump and grind of my neighbours’ lives.

One time he told me that on the night she shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas had come into his shop and bought a pack of smokes and left one of her manifestos on his countertop. “She was one crazy broad, she was wearing one of those little paper boy hats, five feet tall is all she was. I knew she was up to something when she left that coocoo magazine on my counter. I tell ya kid, not for nuttin’, she looked like a real skel, you know what I’m saying?”

He told me that when she left her manifesto there, he had picked it up and read it; The S.C.U.M Manifesto. S.C.U.M stood for Slice and Cut Up Men. He had binned it there and then and went home that night and told his wife about the kooky broad who had left a homemade magazine in his shop about killing men. 

The next day he read in the paper that Andy Warhol had been shot and he didn’t even need to read the rest of the story, he knew who the shooter was. 

Another time he told me that the famous mob boss Joseph Columbo Sr was a regular visitor to his store in the late 60’s. “He was a real nice guy, you know, decent. Not like the wisenheimers runnin’ the streets these days. He was a crook, sure, but we all knew that. He was good to the locals ye know, a real ‘you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours’ type. He was a whatchacallit, an ordinary decent criminal.  A Goodfella, ye know.”  Joseph Columbo Sr. was the boss of the Colombo crime family, one of the "Five Families" of the Cosa Nostra. He died of a heart attack in 1978, and Cesar used to tell me it was because his son broke his heart because he refused to go into the family business. Instead he got a job at Ray’s and delivered pizzas around Brooklyn on a Vespa. “I tell ya kid, he broke his faathas haat the minute he took up deliverin’ those pizzas to all the skels on Brooklyn Avenue, that’s what killed him ya know, the shame of it.”

I didn’t believe most of what he told me. His stories were the essence of him. They were part of the big beautiful mess that made up his entire identity. Whether they were true or not didn’t matter. They were all part of an intricately woven loom full of colour, and light and heavy with detail. I didn’t care if they were true, I loved my time with him. Sitting on his window ledge or leaning against his store counter top. Just listening to whatever fantastic web he would weave next. 

Looking back now I can see that he embellished his stories to create an image of himself that didn’t exist. To make himself feel important, larger than life, part of the ‘big time’. What he really was, was crass, brash and lewd. The language that spilled from his mouth every bit as foul as his body odour. His name was Cesar Almeida, of Portuguese descent, 2nd generation American. He had lived in Brooklyn all his life.  He was a huge hulk of a man, jaundiced and sagging. His thick dark lips peeled back in a half-cocked grin to reveal crooked, yellowing teeth. His big round eyes set deep in leathery caverns, brown as dirt and twice as murky. 

His clothes were always a hodgepodge of Good Will store choice cuts, and you could always see part of his oversized gut, peeking at you through the gap between his t-shirt and corduroy jeans. His hair was obsidian waves of heavy wax, slicked into submission atop a weighty slumping head. 

He was a man who spent his time pouring over the top shelf magazines and learning all of the girls’ names and statistics off by heart. He did this just to impress some of the local boyos who came in fortnightly to purchase the nefarious publications. “It’s what keeps ‘em coming back”, he’d say, “They like to quiz me.”  

He was a man who was well versed in the language of the street. He knew how to talk to people. From the sweet old ladies who came in every morning to buy their groceries and exchange gossip, to the rowdy rabble-rousers who bust through the doors after midnight in a cacophony of dirty jokes and songs, seeking more beer, condoms and smokes.  

He was a  former street vendor, who had worked his way up from a newspaper stall on the sidewalk, to a corner shop of his very own. He understood the world with an earthy wisdom that was harsh and glaring and sharp. He was a walking caricature of himself, a heavy greasy reminder of the way things used to be. 

But despite all of this, despite his weighted stories and ideas of grandeur, despite his enormous  presence and the sticky grip he had on that street corner and the tiny  world that revolved around it, he was forgotten. Ultimately, his insignificance lost him to the city’s rat race. 

But I remember him. I remember the things he said to me, about the good old days and conspiracy theories and how to talk to girls. About the celebrities that used to frequent his shop during the glory days of 1960’s Broadway. I remember his moments of unflinching honesty when asked for advice or guidance. I remember the remorse in his eyes every time he spoke about a son whose name I never knew, but whose picture hung behind the cash register of his shop. He referred to him only as the kid, and spoke about him in hushed baritones, thick with emotion and heartache. His murky brown eyes would glisten then, with the spectre of loss. 

I remember him. 

I hadn’t remembered him in a long time. But today I picked up a paper to read on   my train ride home, and when I turned to the death notices there he was, his face smiling up at me with that sickly saffron grin. He would have been old. Older than my parents I’m sure. I hadn’t even thought about home in years. Not that home anyway. That time in my life was a chaotic blur of isolation, self-deprecation and self-induced loneliness. I tended to shy away from thinking about that time in my life, but now seeing old Cesar staring up at me from the pages of a limp newspaper I couldn’t believe I hadn’t always remembered him. 

Suddenly now, the loss of him felt huge. Bigger than he had ever been in life. This character, this great dusty old man, was suddenly all I could think of, all I could imagine. Memories of hazy summer days spent in his shop, flicking through magazines and squinting at him through the mid-morning glare, the sun bouncing off specks of dust and turning the air to glitter. Suddenly I was filled with such immense sadness. He had saved me in many ways, old Cesar. He had taken me under his own fractured wings, and shielded me from the baying pack of wolves outside. I was not a kid that was cut out for the streets of New York. He saw that in me. Maybe he saw himself in me. All the things I’d never be. 

All the opportunities I’d never have, the way I would become lost in the maelstrom of this unrelenting city. The way he did. Like him, I was just like him. I realised this in a rush of sorrow with a deep guttural ache. I was more like him than my own father.  

And then a stinging pain began in my heart and it occurred to me that he didn’t deserve to ever be forgotten, because he had saved me from the harshness of the world. He was a hero. I felt a compelling need to remember all the other people who’d fallen through the cracks of my prosaic existence. I stayed on my train, for five stops too long, and wrote a list of all the people I had forgotten to remember. Then I stuffed it in my pocket, got off the train and walked back. 

I walked all the way to Brooklyn Bridge and stood in the breeze. I stared down at this piece of paper that I had balled up in a purple fist. 

I began to read their names aloud to the sky, the wind pulling their memories from my lips in icy gusts and carrying them back towards the city.

It was after 11pm when I got home that night, a stiffened wreck of  frozen bones and tear stained cheeks. I looked around my empty apartment, bare and grey, a shrine to banality. I slept that night as though someone had flipped the off switch. Heavy and black and full of remorse. 

The next morning, I decided to ring my parents to tell them about Cesar. They didn’t know. They didn’t remember him either until I reminded them. They didn’t care. They hadn’t cared about him in life, to them he was simply the local corner shop guy. Nothing special, nothing worthy of note. Just a forgettable face in the forgettable history of a forgettable part of their lives. That was it, there was nothing more for me to do. I didn’t know if Cesar had anyone else but me to mourn him. I doubted it. He had never had any other children other than ‘the kid’. The death notice had been simple, an announcement of his death, no ‘mourned by…’ section, just: ‘The death has occurred of Cesar Almeida, late of 86th St. Brooklyn, at his home.’ That was all his life had run to, a single line in the death notices of a local broadsheet. 

I spent the morning on the phone trying to find out where the funeral would be, it was going to be held in St Anne and The Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights. The church was empty but for the coffin, the priest, an altar boy and me. I sat at the back. The soft musty air of the church morphed the distance between myself and the dead into something solid and hard, but I couldn’t bring myself to move any closer. It was a closed coffin and I was glad. I don’t think I could have bared to see what the ravages of time had done to an already ruined man.

At the end of the mass I got up, knelt and blessed myself and turned to leave. “Wait!” the priest called out after me from the pulpit, he made his way down to me, his vestments flapping wildly as he quickened his pace, “Did you know him well?” he asked me. “I used to Father,” I said, “a long time ago, I used to know him.” “It’s so sad isn’t it?” The priests’ voice was unguent and laden with sadness, “How the elderly are so often forgotten, his wife died a few years ago and there really was no one else in his life. 

The funeral was arranged by a nephew who I have never even met, we just spoke over the phone. Cesar came here every Sunday, but I never saw him talking to any of the other parishioners. Oddly enough he always used to sit exactly where you were just sitting.” He said this with a smile and placed his hand over my hand and said, “How exactly did you know him?” I looked long and hard into his eyes, and through a thickness in my throat; “My hero”, I said, “he was my hero.”

I turned on my heels and walked out onto the street. The crisp midday breeze slicing through the dull grey glare. I walked slowly back towards my apartment. The hustle and flow of the city swallowed me whole, and the cold began biting in stinging circles around my eyes, through a different mid-November air.

The Swansong Of Jane Doe

The Swansong of Jane Doe

Overture

The wounds are deep. 

So deep in fact, that I am certain I can see a piece of myself left behind in there. 

Or is that just bone? I’m not too sure, all I am sure of, is that through my attempts to find someone, to find the one, to find anyone, I opened myself up to the world at large and now, there I am. A seeping, bleeding lesion, with a fractured clavicle and a wounded heart. 

I can feel the cold beneath me. My chest cavity pulled open. 

I wonder, how will I look when he stitches me back up? 

I feel his cold fingers wriggling and pulling inside me. I guess you don’t need warm hands when you work with the dead. 

Is that body 21 grams lighter now that I’m free of it? He’s weighing my heart. I can tell that it’s heavy because it still feels like lead inside me. It would seem that the sensation of a broken heart is not limited by bodily constraints. Even a ghost can feel the heft of it. 

I don’t know why I stuck around to watch this. Floating in the ether, a voyeur of my own necropsy. My stiffened lifeless body, splayed out on a steel gurney and slowly, methodically eviscerated. Opened, picked apart, refilled and resealed by a stranger with cold hands.  

A stranger with cold hands, if an undone soul can shudder, well, that’s what I just did. Strange that the thing that brought me to my end, would be the thing that tots up the final sum of all my parts. Yes, a stranger, with cold hands and eyes with no light behind them. That is the last thing I remember. I don’t even remember my name, but I remember his hands, and his eyes, and the ferocity with which I was ejected from my body. 

I begin to feel a pull now, from all around me, wrenching my gut, pulling skin from bones. I am being called, but not by name, not audibly, physically, viscerally. 

I am blinded by the brightest light, that shines a spotlight on my cavernous empty body beneath me. ‘I have to go’, the realization crashes at me. I realise I must go, right now, but I don’t want to, not yet. Moving up towards the light all I can think, all that’s screaming inside my head is, ‘I still have so many questions.’

Motet

Somewhere, above the world and all around it. Where shadows float through the souls of the recently deceased. Both above and beyond the unfathomable thickness of eternity, the black emptiness gives way to a single island of light. There are two people standing inside the light, suspended in dark matter. two glowing bodies of celestial brightness, forcing us to adjust our eyes so that we can see them. As we near them we can see, that right there, out in the middle of the great expanse, these two beings are locked in suspended animation, and a conversation ensues: 

Jane Doe: “Look at me down there, all closed up now, stitched up tighter than a nuns’ twat. Hehe.”

St. Peter: “Wow what a thing to say to St. Peter”

J.D: “Um, sorry, I didn’t see you there, where am I anyway?”

S.P: “Oh, you don’t know? Well technically nowhere, or everywhere, whichever you prefer.”

J.D: “Limbo?”

S.P: “Sort of. ‘A girl of questionable character’, that’s what it says on my clipboard, and questionable language too it seems.”

J.D: “I said sorry”

S.P: “Quite. Well here in nowhere, or everywhere, or Limbo, whatever, we put you through some tests to see which direction to send you.”

J.D: “Which direction?”

S.P: “Up or down dear, up or down.”

J.D: “How is my character questionable?”

S.P: “You have to ask? Booze broads and bullets my child.”

J.D: “Bullets, booze? I don’t even dirnk!”

S.P: “Well, it’s just a turn of phrase isn’t it, anyway, let’s not get hung up on semantics, here shall we? Now, I don’t have the details here, you only atone for your sins after you get through the pearly gates, if you make it that is. Here you just have to prove your worth.”

J.D: “So, what happens if I don’t want to take your tests or whatever?”

S.P: “Down you go then.”

J.D: “Oh”

S.P: “Indeed. So, shall we begin?”

J.D: “Ok, I mean, no, just, just wait I just want to look at myself a little longer.”

S.P: “Ah one of those are we? Well I think that’s part of the problem, vanity is a sin you know.”

J.D: “I know, that’s not why I want to look, it’s just, I don’t know, isn’t it fascinating to you? To look upon your own dead body?”

S.P: “No, my dead body is over 2,000 years old dear, it’s nothing but dust now.”

J.D: “Did you watch yourself decay?”

S.P: “No! Why on earth would anyone want to do a thing like that?”

J.D: “I want to, but then again, while I was alive I watched myself decay from loneliness daily.”

S.P: “Hmm…Self-pity isn’t exactly a sin my dear, but it is frowned upon. Now come along, it’s time for us to begin.”

Crescendo

With no words left on her tongue and a growing, rumbling emptiness in her head, our Jane Doe fell victim to the trickery of St Peter, and while he bamboozled her with trick questions and unfair assessments, she knew in her hollowed-out heart which way she would be sent. 

Such a shame, such a beautiful young thing. She had such promise. So often the victim of treachery it seems. 

You see it turns out, that it is our very humanity that renders us irredeemably tainted in the eyes of our final magistrate. So long have they spent in the company of saints that anything  less than angelic seems wicked, foul and full of sin.  

Not only do they punish for wrong doings, but for lack of good deeds too. They demand answers and justifications for simple naivety, impurities, big sins and small ones.There is no atonement, no ultimate purification of the soul in that endmost hour.  All the parts of you that make you who you are, they see as intrinsically flawed. Fragility and vulnerability are not welcome in the kingdom of Heaven. 

So down she went, all the way down, as far as anyone can ever go. Where she would spend eternity at the mercy of spectres, and shadow people. When it was his time, these devilish strangers would be replaced with the cold hands and dead eyes of one she already knew. Then, she knew she would spend the rest of forever trapped in her killers’ soliloquy. 

Coda 

The internet chat had started innocently enough. He was looking through a Pusheen the Cat fan account on instagram and he noticed her. Her profile picture was so sweet. All of her instagram posts were sweet. Photos of desserts and coffees from various quaint cafes in Dublin filled her profile wall, accompanied by images of odd little japanese toys and figures that she would caption ‘so kawaii’ and follow it with 50 heart eyes emoji.  She was 18, but she didn’t look, or act, day over 14. She lived alone in a bedsit while she attended college. She was the perfect choice for what he had planned. 

He knew he was handsome, he knew he could have any woman he wanted really, but it had taken him a long time to admit to himself, that any woman wasn't what he wanted. In recent months he had finally come to the conclusion that what he was after was something far more...niche. Since having this epiphany it was all he could think about, and from the moment he sparked up a conversation with his special little sunshine he became totally obsessed. It was the freshness of her, the way youth seemed to drip from her skin. She seemed to embody the very essence of purity, delicacy, innocence. It was such an unbelievable turn on. 

He knew he had to have her, to possess her, to take that innocence for himself, take it in such a way that no one could ever have it again after he was finished with her. 

She was a bit chubbier than he usually liked, but it actually made her look younger than she was, and as far as he was concerned the younger the better. Tonight, he had arranged to pick her up after college and bring her to a ‘special place’, she wasn’t really one for nights out she had said, so that sounded perfect, the perfect night, the perfect crime. 

It was a massive step for him of course. He had his fantasies, his porn, his online chats, but he had never actually had the guts to go through with anything this daring in real life. But she was so easy this one. She was practically begging for it, and he was more than happy to oblige. 

The thought of it sent hot shivers up his spine and sent him into a sweat. Oh, tonight would be the night alright. He could nearly taste her terrified, frantic quivering on his tongue. He couldn’t wait. 

His company had recently been assigned to demolish a broken-down warehouse out in the middle of nowhere. No one ever went near it and all the security had been laid off. It was set for demolition in two days’ time. He would take her there. It was perfect. No one would stumble upon them accidently, there was plenty of space and most importantly, no one would ever hear her scream. 

He had everything he needed in the boot of his car, all tucked neatly into a picnic basket. Rope, duct tape, a Stanley blade, a taser and various sex toys in various sizes. He was going to live out every fantasy he had ever had tonight. He had even planned where he was going to dispose of the body when he was done with her.

He kissed his wife goodbye. She thought he was going on a business trip for the weekend. He ruffled his sons’ hair, told him to be good for his Mammy, got into his car, and drove away. A wry smile snaked its way across his face as he entered the coordinates of the girls’ bedsit into his satnav. 

He could barely sit still from the moment she got into the car, his concentration was shot. He couldn’t focus on driving. He was glad of the distraction when she turned on the radio. After a long dark drive, filled with the vacuous conversation of every young college student, they pulled into the car park of the warehouse. He let her go on ahead of him. He didn’t want her to see anything in the boot. He was all fingers and thumbs as he tried to open his basket of toys. A nervous excitement was welling up from the pit of his stomach and he had to stifle a laugh in case she heard him. 

She looked around the condemned building with a childlike wonderment and as he walked in, she spun on her heels and looked up at him with those big doe eyes of hers. The way she looked in the bleak surroundings gave him an instant hard on. She was so helpless, he thought. His hands began to shake with anticipation as he placed the picnic basket on the ground. He had hidden the taser up his sleeve. He called her over to him. She came willingly. As he took her in his arms, and swooped in for a kiss, he slid the taser out of his sleeve behind her head and got her right at the back of the neck. She fell limply into his arms. Now the fun would really begin. 

He stripped her and tied her to an old chair that was already in the warehouse. Bound with duct tape, she looked good enough to eat. He didn’t gag her though. He contemplated it, but decided he wanted to hear her scream, wanted to savour the sound of her fear. He took the blade out of the basket and began to slice into her bare abdomen. Delicate sweeping motions made light bloody cuts across her stomach. She woke up and began to scream. Her tear streaked face gazing at him, her fear palpable. He moved in close, right up to her face so their noses were touching, and he began to laugh hysterically. Until she spat, right in his face. 

The hot anger that bubbled up from inside him caught him off guard. Who did this little bitch think she was? All he could do was stare at her. Boiling rage seethed under his skin, making it crawl. He felt as though he was on fire, and when she spat at him again, he lost all composure. He lunged at her, arms flailing and slashing at that repugnant little mouth of hers. He knocked her over in the chair. Her head crashed loudly off the floor and lost consciousness again. In his rage he almost ended her there and then, just slit the little bitches throat, but he stopped, breathing heavily over her. This needed to wait. She had to be awake for what he was going to do to her. So, he untied her from the chair, laid her out on the floor and stood over her, blade in hand and waited for her to open her eyes. Waited to hear her swansong of screams reverberate off the walls of this desolate waste ground. As her chest would heave in its final death rattle, the exquisite agony of ecstasy he would feel would create an Aria in his head. A song of violence and blood lust, and his hands would be the last to touch her frailty, these walls the last to hear the sounds of an angel calling for home. 

𝄋

Daoine Fásta Na hÉireann

We’ve been running around in circles

We’ve been running without stop

We face you with our wasted youth,

A brave façade to hide the truth

Our sickle cell anaemic smiles

Our plasticine features

And our guts full of bile

You carved our path out for us

And forged it in borrowed gold

But you paved it over quicksand

Never leaving us a foot hold

We’re dancing through the air it seems

Pivoting in one place

Trying to find a tiny part of this fabled elusive rat race

You see

Your superseded greed conceded us to a broken future

And we’ve crawled our way through shattered glass

While you’re still ripping at our sutures

You never give us time to heal

You just…

Pick

And pick

And pick

And tear off the scab that you helped form and

Leave a wound for us to lick

See we’re still running around in circles

We’ll be running until we drop

Running running always running

We’re never going to stop

Running with the bones of the Celtic tiger

We uncovered them in the lost and found

The lost children of Eire

Our country run to ground

By the needs and greed of those before us,

By the wants and whims and sin

Of the blinkered single vision

That you dug our graves within.

and now here we are,

the leanaí na hÉireann

gluing the pieces back in place

of a nation torn asunder

and now bereft of grace.

See we’re running around in circles

Around the chalk outlines that you drew

Around my generations future

We are lost because of you

Seven Years

You were a perfect paradox.
The marriage of lewd brashness and poise and grace.
A perfect lady with the mouth of a Sailor,
And everyone loved you for it.

There are people in everyone's lives that
Create rivets in the path ahead.
Pockets where traces of that person
Become embedded, and this helps to mould the person you become.
Bits of them become integrated pieces of self.

You were that person for me
You still are.
You were always a person I aspired to be like,
Always a person I looked up to and admired,
Always a part of my heart.
You are one of the few people who reside inside my brain.
 One of the tiny voices I go to when things get tough, and I will ask myself: ‘what would fran do or say’
You've always just been one of the smaller pieces that make up who I am.

Seven years goes by in a flash and it's never easy.
You never forget.
You just come to accept a different reality.
A reality without your presence.
That will always be hard.

I love you every day
I miss you every day
My godmother, my mother's best friend
My surrogate aunty
Traces of your sparkle still linger in the gaps you left behind,
A void like no other.
Silver, gold, glistening emptiness in the wake of you.
A woman larger than life
Whose light has always been bigger
Than any grief felt for you,
And brighter than time can dull.
Seven years gone.
Seven years missed.
Forever lost.

Hashtag

A roaring emptiness lingers

In the space between

Our phones and our fingers

It pulls its way through us

Yearning and learning to grow

Learning to flow

A cold-hearted canyon

Born between two mountains of snow

Because the cold in our insides

Taught us how to bridge the gap

Between what happens inside our own heads

And what we put on our Facebook app

You see happiness is currency

Only the rich succeed

We grit our teeth through plastic smiles

While our falsehoods flood your feed.

Well, not falsehoods exactly

Let’s just call them altered truths

But the devils in the details

And details aren’t for you

You see if happiness is currency

Then deception is a warm gun

And we empty out its chambers

Firing bullets by the tonne.

But only from the bright side of a quickly darkened screen

We bash our stories through our thumbs and try to hide what’s real

And that roaring emptiness still lingers,

We can feel it at our backs

We can feel its jaws a-gaping

Its claws flap and snap and crack

So, we update a doctored status

Post a heavily filtered selfie

And we hide behind our hashtags

And our like count feeds their envy

Because we are nothing without our followers

We are empty without likes

We have nothing else to cling to

We are a generation left on ice

We yearn to see a smiley face

We pray for that little heart

Communication down to zero

A forgotten work of art

Because you see, we don’t know how to say we’re sad

And we don’t know that we’re lost

Social media is choking us

We can’t even fathom its cost

With our filtered lives

Forced insta smiles

And safely dishing out our bile

From behind that screen again

We don’t know how to make real friends

And this is what it’s come to

This is what we’re all about

We’ve lost ourselves to a fake façade

Of binary codes and self-doubt

But those thumbs and hearts keep rolling in, the spoils for the devout.

As we worship at this altar formed by others word of mouth