Look At Us

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by contented hopelessness, the inability to learn or care, bleak smiles and worthless opulence, jeering bullies and leering men, the pernicious malignant anger from the rotten spoiled privileged demon children who moan and groan and cry and hit their mothers and shriek like banshees at the slightest inconvenience, the false advertisement of human emotion, gun barrels and internet battles and hate, hate for what we cannot understand

Who are toxic, conceited, insensitive, quick to judge and quick to fear, nasty and immature, believing whatever they want to believe, dodging responsibility like a bullet, desperately clutching at their personally generated sense of selves, pretentious, tone deaf, self-serving, simple-minded, and cruel, rotting from the inside out, dirty and biased and corrupt in mind and soul

Who are blinded, blinded by the money, the fame, the ecstasy, the power that they see in the media, the big illusion, the game. they hide the fact that they aren’t perfect, they hide the impossible, they hide the unimaginable. they hide their insecurities about their defective personalities and their flawed bodies with jokes and diversions, they wash away their social and financial inferiority the best they can with gallons of alcohol and coffee and arsenic, with drugs, with sex, with relationships online, offline, real and fake, significant, senseless, with the flaunting of all they can show to impress and engage, to feel and be felt and be seen and be loved, to be revered in the lie

Who protest vehemently only in the streets of their own screens, hundreds and thousands of streets of cracked glass, endless and winding and ugly and broken, waving invisible signs, screaming in their minds, arms flailing even as they do not move a muscle, voices breaking even in their silence, their tapping thumbs like feet pounding against the ground collectively in a rhythmic beat - the only time they will ever come together, good people, great people, standing for change in a separate shielded selfish disconnected demonstration of guarded entitlement, silently pretending to stomp together in a meaningless insensible stupor

Who find themselves almost bored with the lack of commonplace human destruction on a major scale; with no world war to fight, they fight their own wars inside their minds, the desperate hysterical wars waged against anxiety and depression and desolation and despair, worthlessness, sorrow, death, life, sinking, burning, suffocating sadness choking, constraining, holding, locking their dreams away within their fantasies, sending their goals barreling to the very depths of the cloudy contaminated sea. our self respect gushes out of us like blood from an open wound, we ache for purpose, we live for fantasy, we live for failure. our motivations are drawn from the quiver of hesitant hopeful vague aspirations and sent flying into the void, security is a pipe dream, lies reassure us, confidence becomes a dirty hilarious word as we convince ourselves that laziness is the only coping mechanism for our spiraling minds and self hating hearts

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This poem’s formatting is loosely based off of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” which I love.

Thanks for reading!