SMACK the curb
Smack the walls, the floors, the late-night tabletops
Smack the late-night desktops
Smack those balconies where people take study breaks to smoke and sniff and stall
Smack hard and thin into atomic puddles we go
SMACK
So we can lose ourselves to nonsense, non-words, non-worlds
DRAG our shoes through mud and slush and–
I cannot tell which ones of us are really sane

These fingers
These dactiles spitting game with a keypad
SPIT, BURN, SCRATCH, BLEED these things out of my fingertips
Because my greatest refuge is on a blank white plane
BLANK WHITE PLANE
Hears and never fears what pours from my pores
CORRUPT this spit with rhymes and chimes
What am I saying?
What am I doing?
What the HELL is a road sign?
Who the HELL has the right of way?

I give smartass answers
I am absurd and incoherent
I get hauled into a kitchen to be asked why
Why not, I say
I’ll get mine beaten silly next time I say that
Why?
SMACKED in the face
I think I might feel the same way you do
We SLIP, TRIP, and call it CAVING IN
CRASHING DOWN
COLLAPSING ON ourselves like dying stars
Supernovas or superheroes
We get lost in it all

I have tried to stretch the text around this
I have stretched it thin
Translucent
Hardly transcendent
Call it the humanities
Call it the arts and the sciences of paper
Call it the philosophy of many philosophies
MAGIC
NONSENSE

We are all doing the things we used to think about doing
We get mired in it, and we lunge forward like we could yank a sun out from under
Pushing pulling pressing pinching
Clenching clawing clinching
The greatest problems are the trivial ones sometimes

But remember
Masters of the universe
Is what we are
Each of us
And only for ourselves

Because we always have to answer to ourselves
FORGET that other stuff
Everything else sits on the counter at the cash register
PATHETIC
Those things don’t even get an aisle at the fresh grocer
We got kids to feed
OUR kids
The boys and girls that call us BIG kids
Heroes to the little ones we came from
Little ones we used to be
We are their monuments and majesties and mighty mammoths
Of a world they dared to discover
From the day they learned of a planet beneath their feet

We could be a generation of let-downs
Tragic piles of nauseating unfulfilled wish lists to rub us out
Ripped and unraveled from within
By pissed off child-hearts, child-dreams

Do we really know better than them?
We can babble all we want
And watch the water drain from our fists
And I’ll burry my knuckles in dirt if someone ever tells me I’m–

CHILL
EASE
DROP it
Let it go
Okay
Rescue, rip this heart out and give it air
So I can try anything out
Try this book out
Try this class out
Try this weight out
Try this girl out

Tossed into the deep end
Give me a reason to swim
How about, to keep your head above the water

Learn from it
Grow from it
Flow from it
Free
Be
Me.

Masters of the universe
Is what we are
Each of us
And only for ourselves