Letterbomb

I'm not very good at lying

/?/turn up the volume I see a wall of sound/?/

But I'm pretty bad at telling the truth

/?/the weapon of the modern day is roiling in our minds/?/

I'm told I need to stand up for myself

/?/wait outside the theaters as the blinking mob unbinds/?/

And learn not to talk so much

/!!/burnout meltdown blackout shutdown/!!/

So I don't say anything at all

I watch the crowds that come in waves

In limousines or on soggy cardboard wings

Armed with revolvers and picket signs

To fight their timeless enemies

In the shopping malls and third world

Coughing up invisible ink

Between punches everyone washes his or her hands

(i'd like to buy a vowel please)

The extremes seem so similar

Imprisoned by our obsessive regression

Until your skin is like a sickness that doesn't lets you sleep

Tear a title from the headlines and walk through the snow

Get caught up in the headlights and never say no

I cross my eyes and it all looks the same

I block out my senses until there are no more

Choices to make

//inkblots on landscapes can be so alluring//

I'm finally starting to realize what I look like

Talk like act like

And what the consequences of that are

(I'm acting my age but it's not the time and place)

And to question if I

Should light a match and

Hold it to the frayed edges of parenthesis

Mathematical emotion is in

Emotional mathematics are out

I aim for subtlety and end up confessing

To things I've never heard of and can't even pronounce

The language barrier means less when everything comes out wrong

I'm running on batteries

Saving up my lunch money for letter bombs

Pretending that they'll like me

If I alter my vocabulary

I know it's trite but it's modern warfare

Myopia makes it all so clear

I'm the loudQUIET type

(i accept that my expectations were unreasonable

i thought we'd be discussing the

Barcelona Telephone Exchange

and throwing beer cans off cliffs

or just

falling

with the city afterglow afterimage as backd r o p

but day breaks and everyone returns to their duties

it's so rewarding, conducting studies

that say everyone else is somewhere between unwell and immature

due to narcotics in the water supply or flaws in speech patterns

in the end we all want the same thing:

love and television)

I have no idea what will happen to me

When I go back there.