The process of losing yourself

Run aground in a land of bars
Streets of dust and hurry
Over sized donuts
parking lots and terminals

No rain, so local people urge tears
To wet the ground and demand care

The bus drags on through the sun's glare
Leaves me at the four taverns
Many a surrounding slum in slumber
The candy bar drops and so does the bungy jumper

Downward to sugar upward to scorn
The polar opposite- living to die, dying to be born
Checking belongings
It's time to leave, to detach

What have I left behind?
My heart? My liver? My stomach? my mind?
Jump onto the bus and let it carry me
all the way to the terminal

This city has no heart, no mind
It uses ours to cry and think

Why can't I find myself
Streets have become so familiar
Where is my house, my love?
Those that were left behind by death do so half grieved

The rest accumulates like a lottery of sadness
No letterbox or window ushers me there
I search through the suburbs of panic and heartache
I kneel by the grassy verge near holiday parks outside the city

Rain comes to me there to keep the green, green
A lost friend's umbrella protects me
His words assure me that somehow I've grown
A comfort I have sincerely never known

The babbling masses

Baffled by the expression of a hundred humans who deafened themselves
Who drugged themselves to overdose, who drank themselves into comas
There they sit on the bus, their heads empty of dopamine
Their nerve endings burnt

Some drooling keenly, others frowning it out
Some mumbling just loud enough to hear their insane slurs
Others still tingling from the weekend

The community space where they scream scripture and indignation
Doesn't hit the frontal lobe hard enough to change their habits
fills them with pride and false notions of grandeur

cattle in a cattle cart just south of happy go lucky
Their mouths are for swigs and drags and teats for sucking
Their brains are for entertainment and gossip
A million tools await their use

And if you are no better than that quase buda
If you think having a soul makes us all equal
Look at the loss and damage if you will
What? Did they forget to send you the bill?

It's on the streets and in the tax and water you drink
Perhaps self improvement is not your thing