Wastelands

In the sweet, sticky heat of summertime

street life,

rolling off another spliff while my partner OD’s in the backseat,

my mind doesn’t mind.

He knew the price we’d pay

for this life we’ve made.

We know that death doesn’t wait

and that’s why the wicked don’t sleep.

Shooting pain in my frontal lobe

and the ringing in my head tells me

“This is just a phase”,

but we’re not fools.

Junkies - yes,

but we weren’t fools.

We were just obvious to the ends,

so we remained ignorant to the means.

Deep in the green machine with no power steering, hanging hard to the left and letting my mood slide back and forth on the dashboard. Everything on the radio sound like a muffled 1940’s radio,

while my vision remains filtered through

mall-soft panorama. Everything feels so artificial that I’m consciously dissociating In a sea of confusion.

Drifting further from the shores of reality on a life raft made of anxiety and daydreams. Sweet little moments followed by crippling paranoia.

Wasteland mentality isn’t for the mentally stable. This lifestyle isn’t for the strong minded, strong willed man.

-No.

It’s for the clinically depressed.

It’s for the terminally addicted,

the chemically altered.

This soil is watered with contaminated blood and waste.

The crops grow from rotted roots and produce toxic fruit.

Rotten apples, they say, falling too far the tree to salvage,

poor things.

I hope God saves them

before the state takes them.

Because the world’s got no patients

for hungry hands and sad faces.

Children, stoned and complacent

to the wastelands;

The life set aside for them by society.

Oh, how the hands of fate work,

the steady hands of an artist

molding derelicts out of innocence.