What We Know

No one knows
what it’s like to be me but,
that applies to everybody.

There’s enough
arrogance inside some people
who think they know
what I’m feeling,
what you’re feeling,
but they’re fools
to think so narrowly.

Deaths, cheating wives,
unfaithful husbands, broken homes,
poverty, disease… Our hearts and minds
break by these so differently.

“Oh, I’ve been there.”
One might say, but no one
feels any experience
exactly
the way you do,
the way I do.

Standing there, slouched over,
looking down, tears dripping
into an open casket.
A man walks up.
Shakes my hand.
“I’m sorry.” He says.
“I know it’s tough. I’ve been there.”

Oh how silly of me.
I hadn’t realized the technological
advances in the last twenty years.
This man has cloned himself
after my genes, taken a time machine
into another century, returning later
to console me. How thoughtful.
Where would I be
without a test tube twin,
affording me some insight?

Beware the fixers.
They’re nothing but madmen,
made senile by their riches,
thinking they can buy
the title of physician.

We’re all in the same sea of shit.
Not in ways of equality,
but simply surrounded
by the common masses of destruction,
wading through the only way
we know how,
some taking the one and only
one way street to heaven,
holding the hand of Jesus as he walks
along the yellow brick road
with a tin man in search of a heart,
while others blast their way in,
a hundred virgins waiting to fuck
their brains out.

Some find their salvation
in alleys or bathroom stalls
by sucking cocks or sticking needles
in their arms, rising higher and higher
away from hell, this sea of shit,
gone for moments until reality sinks in.

There’s no escaping,
only dying.
You, me, them. Us.
That’s all we know for sure about anyone.