If I open my mouth,

I would wreck the world and break your heart

Shatter it into a thousand million pieces

If I close it,

I become an accomplice I become a tool I become a statue

And there’s nothing to do nothing to do

While my throat screams for release and my lips are dragged down by meat hooks

There’s nothing to do

I’ve a got a morbid mind

Death follows me everywhere I go

It watches me through dark windows and swarms inside my pillows

It deepens the cracks inside the walls of my sister’s bedroom

And glares from the depths of the ticking clock that sits behind your bed

It lingers behind the faces I love

Your face

Death everywhere and nowhere at once

How daunting

It crosses that line between light and dark

Like Kurtz’s snail that crawls along the edge of a razor

And my carrion heart is wrecked in Death’s reaping

But my head feels clogged and I can’t breath right and my nails are turning blue

And how and how and how

Is this all because of you?

Or is it because of me?

Just please don’t let your summer overtake my winter

My dreams are important too

My           dreams                                    are            important            too

And my morbid morbid morbid mind isn’t good enough for you

But your judging eyes that speak so openly and those quiet words that sting so sharply

And all I can see is red and black and blue but I just want to ease the line, piece the peace back together again

And so I lie

To you

And I say I’m sorry

And I do what I do

But your words

your words are still jammed tightly inside my chest, infesting my mind, stealing away my breath

And the rain that falls like a clarinet’s sinking notes

Make your glasses even foggier

And make me closer friends with

Death

But I’d run after a train for you!

Heroism is a fairytale and villainy is a stereotype I know

But still but still I don’t understand

and I don’t know how to reconcile my skepticism with my integrity

I question everything because that is the only way I know

I don’t want to be controlled to be policed to be drugged by passivity and hauled into a pen

And yet that makes me disrespectful, crazy, irreverent, a freak, “the villain?”

Well I’d rather be that villain with a twirling mustache, a black mask, and a blacker heart in the eyes of everyone I know instead of becoming your lifeless docile form of a sheep

I just don’t understand

And then there’s you

and if I thought I didn’t understand before

then I really am at a loss now

You, the all seeing eye, you, CNN, CCTV, TMZ, Big Brother, every politician that I can think of and more

You, the lens of every iPhone, every advertisement, every screen, every hidden lock and key

Every single eye that follows you from those countless generic coffee shops inside those countless generic malls

Every roving camera that monitors your every step along the pavement

You

And sure Lacan ripped you out from under the covers but I am still here grasping in the dark

Because I still can’t tell you from right or wrong

And I feel my morality and I feel God watching over me and I don’t know what to do

Because I’m no greater a human being than Prufrock

But don’t you think you can come to me with your images and your news

And your debilitating and brainwashing visualizations and indoctrinations of black and white

And your tabloids and your speeches and your words

And your words and your words that get louder and louder and louder

Don’t you eroticize me, don’t you sexualize me

Don’t you make me into your Other

Because I am not your villain and I’m not your superhero

I’m not your barbaric terrorist, your sex object, your exotic belly dancing veiled creature, your oil-shitting billionaire

I am not your MOSLEM I am a MUSLIM

And yes Descartes cried out into the void, “I think therefore I am”

But I think and I don’t know what I am

So where the hell does that leave me?

And I refuse I refuse I refuse to be dragged down with that shame

That guilt, the death, the complete erasure of hundreds thousands millions

Whether by sword or by flag or creed or

Worst of all

By apathy

I refuse.

And for those words that broke your heart

The words that I can’t take back

My actions that have made me, the villain, hurt you

I am sorry for that

But I can’t be sorry for everything else

I wont be.