The Disrespect.

 The lingering smell of garlic  

As I pull my five-seven to my face 

 

They’re out there shrieking again 

Screaming about something 

This place is always reverberating 

Sirens, and backup alarms, and the shriek of machines 

I don’t even chamber a round.  

 

But I can imagine the disdain.  

Always speaking in a language I'm familiar with   

The petulant disrespect of these chunti neighbors  

Always just shy of conflict 

Just below board 

of getting their ass-beaten  

 

and I know what I did — 

To that data center.  

As an awoken dragon, it deserves to burn 

As a Roman decadence. The empire stops here 

To me— 

My empire. 

Borne of my own imagination  

Casually violent and open to aggression 

as everything here seems designed  

To grind away at achievement 

Through some kind of deliberate misanthropy  

That strangles communities 

With the bullshit that is our money  

 

And it feels like— 

Being the skin of society; 

As if we are to be shed to feed the selfish needs of another: thoughtlessly 

And the smell of asphalt lingers,  

in the super-fund site that my whole community grew around.  

Like a mushroom spawned of toxic filth  

 

And i have come to hate this place,  

where my arums grow.  

Where my dog likes the mailman 

That sit like glimmering moments 

Where disrespect is the tip of a cracked chain  

As inherent as the weather 

 

Where carbon monoxide fills the whole house because the neighbor cannot get his shit-box to pass smog and just leaves it running outside my open door while I am inside sleeping.  As if I am laboring into some Rube-Goldberg machine of killing myself. Surrounded by people that are too stupid to grasp anything of merit. 

 

I can accept being poor, but I can't accept being surrounded by morons. How shallow my hopes have become. Meaningless in a wash of political theater and curated controversy.  

How resentful I have become; mired in rancor 

For all of these realms, I crave they be cleansed in fire.  

 

as if the heart of a man could ever subside, cursed as it is.  

 

and this is mine—  

I have done this to myself. Blanketed myself with the stupidity of others, mired in proximity to homeliness and it is dragging me under.  

It is a language I know well.  

 

practiced;  

as the abrasiveness of my personality has made me quite polished.  

I hate all of these things so deeply. As if I am a tesseract of disappointment 

a churning wheel   

that internalizes and externalizes  

every iteration of failure.