I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the commercialized streets at dawn looking for an angry dose of satisfaction,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the newest, brightest object in the factory of the machine,

who masked their whiteness with hungry, growing beards, grungy, ratty, flannels for the price of gold, walking and walking and walking down the same street with the same kinds of people all screaming look at me with my cappuccino and wooden phone case,

who fought a blood thirsty war for a seat at the window of the whitest, cleanest, most minimalist coffee shop so as to sit on the tin stool throne and watch the peasants walk by in platform shoes to claim their own kingdom,

who barricaded themselves with Moleskins and black ink, with thin, metal rectangle screens containing letters and letters of unseen words,

who spoke of history saying wow look how far we’ve come, racism doesn’t exist, and we’re so progressive now, we bring democracy to countries, look how good we have it here now, civil rights solved everything,

who tossed the ink-bleeding, contagiously dirty, unclean, endemic newspaper next to them, telling about the 2,000,000 children fleeing their homeland because of genocide, into the garbage,

who ignored the purple bruises from police brutality but made sure to hashtag black lives matter on #MLKweekend to commemorate how far we’ve come,

who voted for paper laws to “keep the drug lords out” and fund the Great Wall of The American Dream higher than their IQs combined while they slowly started to starve from lack of food because they didn’t know how to roll their sleeves and sew their own seeds,

whose daddys were the rotten crowd, the swarming vultures on the top of the food chain, the socio-economic spider web, the board meeting room, the senate floor: ordering pizza with Uncle Sam’s money,

who roasted, bought, made, sipped fair trade, locally grown, ecologically sustainable coffee and planted, grew, and carefully tended barley for your local microbrew to sip and shake it off and forget and laugh laugh laugh laugh until they could justify ignorance with a haha here and a haha there,

who roasted, bought, made, sipped fair trade coffee so they could click snap post their perfect #butfirstcoffee and get all the omg yums and love love loves and thumbs up from their best friend found inside tiny screens,

who walked down glass streets paved with old, white men on green paper to find the perfect pair of jeans to match their new down, bubble wrap, Michelin Man jacket for the #NationalDonutDay post only a week away,

who typed carefully crafted, long houred essays about life and dreams and hopes and change not for class but, obviously, to celebrities who, obviously, care so much about how much #selfie helped them finally cultivate real self respect,

who lit up bowls and bowls of expensive grass and talked about the injustices of the world in their purest haze and began to peel back the layers of their own discontent and wipe the deceptive film of fiction from the lenses of their trendy glass frames for an hour or two, until their stomach’s howled at them in demand of fourth meal’s crunch wrap supreme.

II

What laser of insidious obsession with their selves cut open the flesh of their porcelain skin and contaminated their bloodlines, brain cells, and blinded their minds of the ability to think a pure thought?

Baal! Kanye! Jezebel! Gigi! Moloch! Donald Trump! Money! Power! Sex! Sex! SEX! Body Image! SKINNY SKINNY SKINNY! Facebook! Instagram Fame! Social Media! Commercials!

Sororities, Fraternities, matching ΔΓs or KKKs and Lambda Phi Epsilon paying gobs for friends in a tired hamster wheel of discontented people masking reality with bathtubs of poisonous punch,

The Real Housewives! The Bachelor! Dance Moms! but when the TV’s off we’re all just Naked and Afraid to turn off the likes and buzzing and constant noise because it never ends and we have to be up to date with

Justin Bieber! Kim Kardashian! Donald Trump! Money! Power! Fame!

They broke their backs repenting of the fourth meal, cleansing from the jungle juice by running sprinting crawling lifting desperately towards looking into the mirror at a beautiful, iridescent, white pile of bones; looking into the mirror at a figure so perfect only a slight gust of wind could blow it over completely,

America’s Next Top Model! Sport’s Illustrated! Playboy! Pornography! Girls crying in front of reflections! Boys lifting and lifting to gain recognition! Boys saying anything for the laugh! Girls laughing at anything for the like!

Smoking! Drinking! Orgies! Ecstasy! Molly! Cocaine! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Jumping into life so free, without a care, so fun, so many friends, so many new posts on virtual stories,

Jumping to festivals! Jumping to coffee shops! Jumping in overalls! Jumping in beanies! Jumping with top-knots! Jumping with man-buns! Jumping with flannels! Jumping with polaroid cameras!

Jumping for the pic!

In need of a thrill?

Jumping off rocks!

Jumping off bridges!

Jumping off buildings!

Everyone’s doing it! Come on! Jump for the pic!

Mad generation. The wild eyes, the howling yells in the life of night. They broke their backs for the opinions of others. Jump off the building! JUMP! Don’t forget to smile on the way down!

III

Anyone who gives the slightest of shits! I’m here in my room

unable to keep up the facade of our generation

I’m here in my room

on “National Coffee Day” throwing my metal box at the wall and pictures and pictures of frothy coffee explodes like fireworks in cyberspace

I’m here in my room

with a guttural plea that may never be heard in spoken word

but needs to be said, or I guess, read:

Shut up.

Hear the words you need to hear

and listen.

I’m here in my room thinking of a time

where we wake up in a rebirth with crisp souls like your endless succulents thirsting for the water day of the week.

O skinny legs run outside, away from the mirror,

O starry night, under the paled moon illuminating a white world with straight lines, heal our minds and bring them to life,

O please somebody, anybody, press the pause button, restart yourself-

We’re free! We’re free! We’re free?

WE ARE FREE.

Live like it

I’m here in my room

and in my dreams I’ll open my eyes as the sun touches us from the East and see a group of people waking from the raging fire of narcissism ready to journey towards water of reincarnation.