Nerves

Why are we here

Three and a half billion years

Since life arrived on this cosmic pier

Trillions more since the first star fired its gears

Oh again, why are we here, why are we here, why are we here

Is it to fret over essays, deadlines, timelines, and traffic fines?

Perhaps to praise pathetic deities with insecurity issues?

Or maybe to toil away at endless labor

rolling the stone of Sisyphus

Why are we here and why do I feel

Like I shouldn't be there or do this or think that

Like I ought to be on the way to somewhere else

Or that I should be procuring my attention elsewhere

A dose of nausea and anxiety

A cigarette sip away from thin fulfillment

Spinning dizzy racing, it rains and reins

Drenched in the most excited types of negative emotions

The only thing to calm that I must think

The cooling planet eons ago I see

I see monkeys in trees and cars

Descending from trees to cars

and performing their ooking calls

Language squawking though you say talking

Now these beings don't intimidate me

Now that I appreciate their form

Man is ape, and still has not overmanned

My only expectations are to squawk right when squawked at and not to act at

anything at all even if I feel like I've been verbally attacked

At that, my peaceful apedreams e-vap

My emotional state snaps back, I shake

My stomach's liquefied everything I had ate

Cold hands as my veins contract

Mind sighted Prof's eyes are like A.I.

His assumptions stab into the cavity walls of where my soul once slept

I just can't stand how he feels about me

I'm starving again but too nauseous for food

The desire to cradle next to a radiator with a cyanide capsule

is strangely warming

Chain smoking causes a bad flavor

Crying feels like it'd be warm now too

So does sleeping

I'm avoiding everyone I know

Squawking to them is too much

My frat wants me back

but I don't want to be their number

I don't want to here "no offense" before each and every

homophobic slur

I'm glad psych club is no more

Rising early for weekly meetings and what for?

For attendance at the Student Government meetings

to keep a club active that doesn't meet, to record notes

that no-one will review

Wonder, anxiety, forced wonder, anxiety, tiring

One can only be in terror for so long

Before the nerves are and sleep is required

Even the muscles in my forehead temples are exhausted

We, especially those ones

Its the last year of the pattern

Then I enter a new pattern

Like a new hill for Sisyphus, or a new stone

Why at the top of the hill

Do I feel like taking my hands off his rock

and placing them behind my back

standing firm

Like a toothpick facing a bowling ball on a slope

Twenty thousand years since climbing trees

Rolling stones up hills is the sum of human achievement

and your pretentious views about the types of hills these stones are rolled on

and the types of stones rolled up these hills

are projections of your own materialistic insecurities

as you believed the myth about the existence of quality

Oh you pretentious fool

We are doing nothing at all but rolling stones

It doesn't really matter how you roll it or if you even do

But being that this is all we do

When you critique the way another does it...

Well, Sartre was right about people