Trickle-Down Happiness

I see even now where I’m sitting

On the couch by slanted stairs

Spiraling down towards lives unending

Lost in every remnant of lasting despair

Do you ever find yourself so tired?

Exhausted by the lives that might be?

Something to hear more than an echo

Of one less whale who’s been lost out at sea

Like you’ve been told to hold your head beneath water

As if you’re bobbing for apples or dreams

There might yet be something to hold onto

Like a rotting stem held between rotten teeth

Such a hope would hold the tide steady

And fight every war in a dead man’s boots

But what is the point of false missiles when

You have rusted guns or a knife that won’t shoot

Death at the men who would die for a cause

Even when they don’t know what it is

Draped in a flag that bleeds the darkest of reds

Like a marker or a pen etched in skin

A tattoo that’s been given every meaning

In retrospect like childhood love

Where we hope and we wish that we knew what it was

When all we’ve ever known is a mirage

That stands in the corner of the room that we’ve built

With its back to the camera or screen

A fragment or a memory or a heartbeat so weak

That every whisper might sound like a scream

From deep beneath the earth that we’ve soured

To trail away as a plaintive cry

Dug away until even our tenth finger bled

Strawberry red to mix with our lies

That we’ve told to everyone we thought we might know

In the panic of societal fear

Pinned to a wall in a house of cards that might fall

We built for the one who might hear

Each cry for the sake of the lonely

Each promise for those who are deaf

Lost to the moments of poetry scribbled

In the final lines of a man now near death

To be found where he sits near the ocean

A sunset and sand dollar in hand

Trying to pay this his final one way

Only to find even infinite waters can be damned

To rise like a tide so stagnant

To sour with the fish who can’t swim

Not even for the sake of the stars that might guide

Even when they’re firefly lights that grow dim

In the face of an unending promise

And for the sake of all that might be

You were only the moon in the river that rose

And I’m a man on a couch on a Saturday night, too afraid to die ever to sleep

To see

The wet road stretched out so short

But that doesn’t matter

Where I’m going, each thought is scattered

I rest on anchors and

Well.

No matter the depth of the ocean, no matter the strength of the seas,

I thought I was made out of iron and yet…

I have been dropped in the water.

And every anchor sinks.