I spent the night staring out my window.

The bricks in front, the strangers below.

Their thoughts rose like steam from sewers

And blinded my heart with concerns much newer

To me.

It shocked me to think I knew their troubles

Like I was buried under that same war-torn rubble,

But I suppose that’s what it means

To be human, or at least that’s how it seems.

Every night it’s someone new

Walking past and a whole new brew

Of worries and fears

And eyes like headlight deers.

A saga of tumult and sacrilegious ant-sized men in suits and ties.

Fill the pages, handwritten, sloppy yet legible amenities,

For late night dinner parties and cocktails and compliments

And the veneer smiles.

–

Eventually one man will see the sun over rocky mountains

Cracked with professionally trained white enamel.

Excavates the geology of social interaction and party sins.

Now is not the time for him to break away the crust of will.

–

His parents taught him who he was, and he never questioned it.

He wrote off expenses with diamond tipped single-use pens,

And doesn’t know how to live.