I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Everquest.
Searching, with glare strained red myopic eyes,
flying aloft fiber optic spines,
liberated from the corporeal cells of your world
to become infinite, anonymous, living spirit!
Yet, in effect, motionless.
Locked in stasis,
frozen in front of screens
or behind the wheel.
Driven to distraction by playlists
on the way to jobs that promise nothing but the next paycheck.
And they give nothing in return,
save their bodies and their time,
or lives,
either way, it doesn’t matter, I want to take you in my arms,
squeeze out the pain,
wash away the stink of dirty blood,
and teach you how to love.

The daily wake and bakers
The morning, noon, and night pill takers
The bent behind their desk hip flask fire drinkers
The after class gas huffers
Zombified
Acrid bloody monsters
Burnt out husks following the wind
All the people on the street alone
purposefully talking, who don’t even own a telephone
The uninvited
The whispered about
The blessed, catching the AM Express
The brilliant frantic scrawling
The narrative drifters
The urban dog walkers lost in song
The shut in
The cast out
The long gone
The freaks so far out there isn’t even a word for them yet
The chronically fucked
The had just about enough
The despised
getting together
throwing a party in the street
not even caring about the cops barreling down with orders to break it up

Things add up
they ebb and flow and make waves
waves that hit me before I’ve had a chance to catch my breath from the last one.
I think maybe I’ve been sucked out a little too deep
I think maybe I’m a little bit small to fight this pull forward
It feels like things are always fighting me
keeping me from where I want to go.
Maybe it’s like that for everyone
all of us drowning in slow motion.

Don’t speak to me of saviors,
of men who walked on water
and moved a mighty mountain
but died like any other,
to be served up to the faithful
like lambs lined up for slaughter,
protected from the weather by a coat of many colors,
none of which will save them
from the ground that must reclaim them
when the seas of reason,
that provided succor
for many hungry sailors,
are frozen like a feral creature
whose eyes reflect the headlights
of that it can’t remember
we’ll sink beneath the reach of saviors like a stone.