American Dreaming (A Collage poem)

Our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there

It’s that we ignore the ones who are

And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting

I am pretty damn naïve

But the truth is

You’re a liar

 

There is too much war in every verse of our silence

Reality weighs heavily in our bed

Naked and lonely

To think

We were once held together

By imagining-

Tasting every sweet nothing our minds could offer

An arrangement of derangements: And I’d eat you to live

 

But we’d fall

The way we’d always fall

Blue skies straight through to

Black, landing on golden yellows and fiery reds

Breathing in the familiar shock of confusion and chaos

Where trees are weeping

 

I keep trying to tell them

New leaves will come around in the spring

But you can’t tell trees those things

They’re like me

They just stand there and don’t listen

 

I wished you wished I was there

 

I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon

But I am the type to fake believe your campaign

You could sell greed and destruction

But I couldn’t even sell

Look at me

 

So I packed my things

Finger-painted Fuck You in photographs

Because my sober hurts

And if this is the American Dream

You can have every acre

 

I’ll carve freedom into seeds

Swallow them whole

And watch branches sprout from my lifelines

Songbirds perched on my fingertips

Singing-

Wake me

Wake me when the American Dream is over

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