Reaction

The lights are different colors
and you focus on them,
from the backseat, through
the rain drenched windshield.
They are there to fill the paths
of people desperate to spend their money.
All the unpleasant feelings inside them
just more planned obsolescence,
or the gnawing of cigarettes by the smoker.
Costumes are forced upon youth
and elders alike as a visual confirmation
they deserve no respect.
Black orbs in every corner with blinking
red lights at their centers, always scolding
you to remember who you work for.
You go to a garage at the edge of the city
where noise and pointless sex are drank
like wine, and are also all the sounds
that fill the night.
It’s just another endless fight
you have with yourself in a circle.
Punching walls and smoke filled halls
that lead right back to where you started.
Alone in cheap apartments if you’re among
the lucky. Half dead out in the cold if you
are not. You shakily just smoke some pot
and remember the summers when you had
nothing but time. You’re future plans
didn’t have to rhyme.
They just sang from a place of nonsense
a lot like watching someone’s whole world
fall apart.
At some point you will have to start.
This place is full of stories about people
being destroyed by the road, and on this
spinning globe it doesn’t matter how you
think things ought to go.
The buildings bend like plastic straws to
lean over your shoulder and whisper that
they know what you’ve been doing.
Art is merely a violent reaction.
It is taking a hammer to everything around
you, and while it happens,
it feels so amazing you can’t stop.
Eventually though
you have to finish, and when you
look at what you’ve done
you’ll wish you didn’t.