The Gilded Age

A faceless name. Typed out text isolated in a white space that consumes like a vacuum.

A nameless face with a statuesque expression framed still,
on display, passing absently, unchanged,
like a dot of white noise forgotten in the hypnotism of its drone.  

An eyelash falls.  
Hair loosens and escapes with the bristles of a comb.  
A cavity breaks into a tooth
and the gums make a withering retreat and weaken their grip.  
Skin cells tighten and die,
fall away in streams of heated, artificial, contained rainfall.  
Surprise, smiles, frowns,
screams and all representations of emotions,
true or staged,
dig their place in the deepening lines of the face.  
We fall apart along our way, rotting in motion.  
Our skull exposed every time we grin.

We reject  bodies in favor of photographs.  
A one-dimensional compromise.  
No resistance, no rejection, guaranteed.  
No questions asked.  No questions answered.  
No words to ponder.  No hidden message to suspect.  
Just hanging on to the hunger,
the craving, the unquenched desire that makes us feel alive.
 
The journey is the best part
and the arrival is just a place to die.  

The grass is greener on the other side
because we haven't yet had a chance to trample it
brown and barren.  

If what you love survives
then you did not truly love it.  
It wants a consensual murder
and insists on suicide.  

Brains encased in culture plastic, raging in starvation,
power their way through congested streets.  
Signs taming the need for reckless wandering
and undestined direction.  
Traveling in mechanical shells.  
Steel beasts running in herds on rubber wheels, exhaling our apocalypse.  

Blazed conceit.  
Severed cold.  
Bitter tasted t.v. stains burning out with impossible expectations.

Safe but forever afraid.