Who Are We Now?

I've spent years soul-searching before I realized I don't have one. Thinking through the thoughts I thought I had fought to the back of my mind. Turns out they're just intwined in the recesses, and my guess is as good as yours as to how long they plan to stay.

They plan to haunt us.

Why do you serve to be the glue that holds us two together. You're the concrete under our worn feet walking this broken road that rises and falls like the lungs of a person doomed to die.

I was the guy who sat at the back, stabbed in the back by everyone I knew. Called names I thought were a frame around my life I couldn't break. I'd spend my recess writing to de-stress, the only thing my classmates couldn't take.

But there was another. The father and mother of a family where I was the ungrateful son. A boy who'd spend his days collecting trays for shit wages. Missing school because his face was too ugly to be cool.

If you tried to talk he'd walk away. In class he would sit and stare blankly and frankly I don't care if you think he's ok because he's not. The knot in his stomach still tying him to the times in gym where his clothes, hand-me-downs looked down upon, and socks stolen by jocks, laughing at a kid trying to make the best of what he's got.

But we wouldn't cry.

Now don't tell me it's just 'playing', because for some kids it's pay to play and the cost is a life. They try to cut away the pain and the shame and to forget the endless rain of abuse. To swallow all the ills with a few pills and a bottle of cheap swill from the store down the street.

This was the road beneath our feet.

Defenseless, young, the system systematically let us down, left us part of that million faceless, wearing our jester's crown. We were sunburnt for trying to touch the stars, to rise above our apparent place, the rash for being rash and stepping from the ashes of our mistakes.

This road is broken in half, we're on separate sides of the same coin standing in the same place somehow in different worlds.

Who knew you'd die first..