powerless to speak.  speaking is powerless.
no one to hear.
no one to care.
no one could do a thing anyway.

words push us away from each other.
words are a safety net
to keep people from falling
into each other
in their times of need.

there is nothing to say
anyway.

the switches are fixed in two positions
if they're even touched:
bear it
or whine
and no one wants to hear it,
so bear it
so no one sees it.

the current will run
on different paths perhaps
buzzing and pretending life
or pretending death
a live wire waiting
to turn something on.

***

i want to sleep.  i hate, but i can't act on it.  i hate, but i shouldn't speak of it.  i want to be stronger, but i feel so tired.  i feel so uninspired.  i can get by the machinations of life.  i can even, for a moment, pretend i'm flying, on the lilting wave of a brief-lived success.  but inside, i am rotten and gravity-prone.  look out below.

this world is broken [is broken is broken... can you hear the echoes wash over you, so many lost souls have said it before, with perhaps more sincerity and conviction, that it might as well not have been said, by me, at all.]

the ties to love, i still believe in, if i were strong enough.  if i weren't so damned tired.  today, instead of me pulling them, they pull me up (hell, they probably have been my props forever, stupid mannequin that i am, with my faux powerlessness, a condition that i blame upon the one that i hate, but which was probably a decision to be lazy, a stance of rebellion against this world; NOT something innocent and choiceless.).

PULL me up and out.  and at em.

ha.