Silence echoes across the cracked asphalt streets,
Stinking in an intense evening fever.
Well kept lawns wither in July heat.
Everything has become alien, distant, unimportant.
A fatigue born of frustration, unrelieved by caffeine & speed.
A lethargy of the soul, incapacitating apathy.
Going through the motions, mechanical responses,
Dull edge of a blade trying to cut through steel skin.
Is this the price for a decade of overindulgence?
Watching as one by one people trickle away
Or curl up in a bottle & drown in indifference.
Spent cartridges of creativity litter the battlefield.
Instruments gather dust, stacked in the dark underground.
Living free became living fiscally responsibly.
There is a catch to every deal.
Weddings & babies juxtaposed against meth pipes & coke binges.
Working to exhaustion to pay bills, have a house, become respectable.
Time off spent sleeping to prepare for more work to get more money,
Trading the remains of a dull youth for reality TV, cigarettes & beer.
Decade of self-destruction in pursuit of something
Intangible, quicksilver, xenon gas.
Little glass bottles line the shelves, evidence of self-suppression.
Plastic pill bottles on the table, in drawers, scattered on the floor.
Ashtray piled high with dead roaches, casualties in the war of senses.
Tinctures, droppers, injections, treating the symptoms,
Feeding the disease.
-Jack Blare, 2019
jblareink 