to be a person.

i.



i feel like time is dragging me along by the hand

the way a mother tugs her child to preschool/

but instead of kicking and flailing and screaming

i am numb to the days that pass

despite my silent urgency. 



there is so much i want to do

but my body is stone/

and my mind is blank. 



i am no longer stardust—

now i bathe in my self-pity and despise everything. 



i do not want to be here because there is nothing 

here. we somehow listen to people who live hundreds of years in the past and blindly follow words on pages that need to be rewritten/ and i hate them all with an intensity that burrows itself into my bones but refuses to be released. i know i am a coward; i have said it before. 



and this is why i would not survive anywhere else, why i would not survive in the pages i wish to disappear into. because i am not what i read/ i am merely a foolish pretender. 





ii.



i hate that our lives can be measured in minutes. 



i cannot determine if it is time well spent or if i am wasting days to an assemblage of wires/ but i do not care anymore because i am young and i still have time (on my side). 



it is the only thing that eases pain so i succumb and become endless. /i know too much; i do not know enough./





iii.



i think my greatest desire is to be extraordinary even though i am far from it. of the billions of people on this burning planet i must have the same thoughts as another.



individuality is a lie. 



sometimes i think the world is out to get me because i am in a perpetual state of loneliness and i know i could do something to change it but/ i prefer to wallow and sit inside my egocentric being. 



sometimes i think i hate myself because of who i am but then i realize i hate myself only

because of the world. i have been told by the world since childhood that i am not enough and despite my greatest efforts to whittle myself back down into a blank piece of wood/ i persist unwillingly.