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This kid in my dual-focus group for addiction recovery  fits the bill for fast cars with extroverted numbskulls  propped up like toyguns in the passenger window.  He talks at length about his parole officer, setbacks  related to opioids, his pregnant girlfriend.  He's a member of the TikTok Generation, clinging  to short attention-spans while nursing contempt  for the choice.  They all think they're unique without equal.  They extend their love & support like so much Valentine's Day  candy and assume it has a far greater value.  But give him and his social siblings 8 or 10 years  while you both study the gradual depletion of the ego  tempered by mature disagreement. Catalogue the history  of lies whose every strategy is to preserve the worthless.  Don't be surprised when the wave of psychic crucifixions  of laziness and shame come into the flesh in their 30s.  How adroitly they pivot to stoic respon...

You find a second-skeleton when there's a camera  pointed at you, apparently: the dismissed or censored  portions of your belief system lay their hands on  a remote-control, enhancing, editing the various imperfections  of your mind.  See the undercooked American male, most frequently in  his 20s, but often still decidedly older... He has fingers  for removing bras, the stamina of an elephant, rushes out  of his clothes to display of the commercially-successful cock.  Yet his humor is nervous, a bargaining tool in an unpersuasive  proposition. He's heard many stories and lectures on the  discreet power of character yet he is unmistakably lack- adaisical furnishing details for this code of honor.  And the more of them you put in a room, a comment  section, a sidewalk for that matter, the more nervous  and reflexively agreeable they get. Are their fathers  the ambivalent, dispirited men I always see talking between...

The latticework of you is all but completely invisible. From humble protoplasm the fluid threads of your body weave in & out of the morass, constructing bone and marrow and viscera and cells and nerves and muscle. The volition of the new creature extends in natural vulnerability to the sides of the womb. The fledgling thalamus drafts and rehearses protocols for securing food upon eviction. You're provided with a name, free to keep without financial promise. Manners, ethics, and the laws of the land, popular and obscure, benefit from expounding and the latticework weighs the odds & consequences they suggest. Puberty seems to arouse suspicion and concern regardless of geographics, ancestry or any personal inclinations whatever: the body is inundated with new hormones that challenge and undermine in discreet and profound capacities and the mind secures a private location up there, behind the right eye, approximately. Hoping for relief from trespasses and a plot of land to call...

 "Be of the nature of devotion."  ****  The trees look like they're trying to imitate the birds.  At least while the wind was passing through. Even the sun  is making an exit for the door. Approximately, austerely.  The light on the somber trees resists convenient description.  They don't seem to ask for anything. Fortified in the calm  of a mute, benevolent god, deaf to all concerns for luxury  and wed by veneration to the core of its galactic self.  The birds murmur humbly and critically amid daydreams  of the magnificently dramatic world that proceeded this  millions of years ago. They sense crime that they  have no means to alter. In between songs of victory and  birth they stammer a few verses in the name of  mercy. The crickets and the frogs raise up the curtain of  the night, and the yellow light turns paler, gray, gone.  **** 

What if you could go to the left side of your brain and  see a future worth living in? The streets outside are  filled with mad men, barbarians killing and cheating  with every breath in their lungs. There is no  useful wisdom to be drawn from their behaviour.  Only the defiled and depraved silence of hope lost to the banality of the jungle. Seek your enlightenment like the light of a fire, close enough that your eyes don't  have to squint and guess the true measure of the distance, yet neither so close that you lose sense of what the flame was meant to clarify. The doors remain locked, your tea is ready, the octopus gathers your heart up  into your brain, takes the whole thing with colossal  hunger & the demonic eye of wrath-induced vengeance, the shovelers retire, the clerks close the drawer, and the moon sighs like a walrus, acclimated to the sin of time. Then tomorrow was already half here.   

Some people get paid to know  that I've been smoking pot.  They have reliable methods  approved by society, supported  by catalogues of laws and ethics,  venerated seriously as ancient maxims  of deceit, tragedy and love.  They accuse me of drinking too much.  We don't see eye-to-eye on medicine.  My vocabulary of neurological and  psychiatric terminology seems slightly  larger from my point-of-view.  Do my doctors suffer a lack of distinction  between the functions of their amygdalas  and hypothalamic nuclei and the muscular  tissue traversing their phalanges?  -Pause to inspect the crud in one of my fingernails  like urine and defeat at a crimescene.  When you get fed up with people, when you're ready to hang them from the trees,  pause to ask yourself Did Malcolm X have to put up with this shit?  Your hatred and your soul are equally in grasp of each other's direction,  they speak...