The Last Party

Honestly, I didn’t really want

to leave after being seen,

but swathed in cotton paper

thin skin, and absent any

accompanying friend,

I felt powerless to stay,

vulnerable, naked, afraid,

especially without wine’s

numbing, warmly comforting,

sparkling glow of social charm,

the kind I didn’t have to put on,

also the kind there’s no filter on,

not to mention the kind decidedly

done.

So instead, isolating alone,

mocktailing and hiding shyly

behind my phone, anxiety

spiked my mind and laced

my awkwardly constructed

smile when approached

by well-meaning community

blinded to my overwhelming

self-judgment, self-consciously

directing encounters to mirror

me: forced, fearful, and fake.

Social living without libations’

lubricants can sometimes really

chafe.

Redefibrillate

It can be no demonstrable secret

that our collective global anxiety

is growing detrimental to humanity,

that sum total of a being of living

singularities, the consciousness

of which has tuned its frequency

to an information oversaturation

no longer buffered by medication

or meditation. There can be

only one remedy for this.

Redefibrillate

We gobble up gunfights like gumballs

We gobble up gunfights like gumballs,

in movies, on television, through screens,

masochistically cracking our jaws, broke

on sweet killing machines rotting our

society from inside out, numbing our

emotions down, but loud as bullet shells

scattered on kids’ school sidewalks is

the shame we no longer give a damn.