Outside the nut house
Everybody is crazy
They just do what they’re told
Walk
Like they’re expected to walk
Cry
Like they’ve seen people
On the television do
Kill
Just like in the movies
Work
Like it looks like they’re working
They’re well trained
These thinking monkeys
Their sanity is a performance
Timed to perfection
Inside the nut house
It’s the same as outside
Except people don’t know how to act
Their walks are limps
Their job is to swallow pills and sleep
Without killing anybody
They can’t cry
Because the needle in their arse
Has siphoned away
All of their television tears
I hide in the halfway house
I know how to act
I know if I walk as normally as possible
Without drawing undue attention
No one will lock me up
My job is to write poems like this
To explain myself to me
But when I cry
The television drowns
Under cascading waterfalls
Of unchecked emotion
The power goes out
Temporarily
And I stab myself in the head
In the darkness
Over and over
With a plastic fork
And when I die
I will act pretty much the same way
I’ll just go from moving slow
To not moving
By the time it comes around for me
The television will have been swept away
Eons ago
There will be no tears
As no one will remember how to cry
And in my open casket
I will be smiling
Just like I bribed the guy at the morgue
To make me
To manipulate my lips
To airbrush away my mistakes
My psychological acne, my horrors
A life of grinding teeth
Like the pickets
Of an old rickety fence
That keeps nothing in
And nothing out
Wiped out of existence
Torn from the suspiciously moist pages
Of a bland, well performed history
And the people
They will think I was happy
Truly happy
Like they’re supposed to
