What’s left for us to do but wait for death, we who peaked too early in the hallowed halls of hollow human wisdom

What’s left for us to do but wait for death, we who peaked

too early in the hallowed halls of hollow human wisdom

Whose glory came at five a.m. on a Wednesday morning

on the bat-thin wings of eighteen text-dark pages

made featherdown thick through the frosted glass

of a five buck bottle of wine

The example of excellence—excrement, wrapped in a gold ribbon and held up

(to mockery)

(at gunpoint)

As evidence that the system isn’t failing, no matter what

television says—

It’s lied to us before—

Whose names become synonymous with eponymous,

glorious… anonymous

Who know with nauseating certainty their role in post-

collegiate America is not as sacrosanct scribe but

synchronized soldier in the never-ending fight for

truth justice and the American dollar

Who wake in the morning with every hair blazing,

knowing they’ll never get everything done, and that they are falling—failing

Whose diets consist of caffeine and Prozac and chalk-

white antacids

Who dream of handprints in cement, the light just after a

flash fades, their face on film for the cover of

People magazine

Who dream of being left alone with their TVs

Who dream of something more than one published story

and a Ginsbergian howl to show their children

when they ask what their parents did before they

lost their lives

Who dream of being more than what they are

Who dream of being less than what their professors and

their parents and the public think they are?

Who don’t even really have a public?