Shards

It’s not right is it?
A train wreck, rain check face with half-paid smiles and fever red lips
Pasted over a last chance resolve that never made it out of bed when the digits dropped
It’s days like this
When badly photocopied eyes
Which couldn’t afford the full color prints
Take up space on that billboard
Days like this
When angel laced asphalt screams obscenities from wheel-worn poverty and the collective reply of the masses is “suck it up
Everybody hurts”
And I ask myself
How it is that we manage such mayhem
Tucked in pinstripes and patted down with disposable lint rollers
To fill a world so desperate for everything else with the one thing we have in abundance
Rejection
Percentage-wise, we’ve never been a willing lot of responsible users
For all our talk, we salvage less and suffer more than skin can show through tight black fishnets on distant side streets
Only to look ourselves in the mirror
With badly photocopied eyes
Lie
And return again
But underneath our ink and recycled paper
We are dying for some color
Just a life less ordinary
In a disposable population
With reusable souls
That do not need to be told
“you look good today”
We need to be held
We need to be picked up off the sidewalk
And, with the shards of our broken mirrors
Shred these simple sub-standard pie charts
And drive the razor edge into our veins until we bleed the deepest shade of candy apple red onto this monotone mess
All the dreams
All the dreams flowing out into a Pollock mind blaze of a stain big enough to wash away days like today
Until eyes speak like Pluto in exile, saying “we will not go quietly”
And the shards of our broken mirrors become tools of redemption
Cutting through hollow point media masquerades and idealistic beauty
Slicing these badly photocopied eyes off rain-washed billboards
Until shards of our broken mirrors become weapons
Our Constantine sign of rebel beauty
Our anthem of being more than a mass of flesh and social statistics
Rebirthed carving out a new generation
Unwilling to dwindle quietly behind conventional wisdom cooked up by cultural bias
And the shards of our broken mirrors
Will become the passkey to a new beauty
A new breed that bleeds bright eyed dreams into our empty streets
With shards sharpened like knives against the skin of what we have been
To shed those faded yesterdays
And set us free
To be tomorrow

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