By Sarah Chung
The leather book cracks under the touch of your fingertips.
It lies open on your lap, waiting for you to become interested.
You begin to shake your leg up and down,
thinking about your absences at parties.
You look down and try to focus on the printed words,
but they mean nothing to you; it’s just ink on paper.
Your mind starts to wander.
You can’t help but think about the quiet passing whispers
from everyone you’ve met.
You’re defined as dull and unhumorous
because you elongate your vowels
and talk about the peculiar shapes in the sky for hours on end.
And you dread the way they talk about your writing.
They tell you it’s “too deep”,
but how do they know that
if they are unwilling to explore it themselves?
They never question what’s given
and the curiousness of the unknown feels useless to them all.
The temptation of playing God
by sitting and watching people from the comfort of their home
can be seen as an addict’s pastime.
You ask, “What more can go wrong?”
Till death, soft hands will profit off of our fragile glass like minds.
And the need to win escalates and obedience is survival.
Now, you don’t hate our generation
you miss it.
You miss honest conversations,
unexplained childlike facial expressions, and so on.
But, that paraphernalia gets diluted, slowly, in the field of your mind.
The isolation of reality now occupying that space.
And in the final moments,
you get lost in the eyes of your chemically divine love.