A Drifter’s Screaming Silence

What have we done to the world?
It’s a carcass now, rotting under the weight of wallets,
and the vultures are us, picking at the scraps,
laughing with mouths full of blood and lies.

Love? Don’t make me laugh.
Love is a transaction,
a handshake in the dark,
a hollow promise sealed with a kiss
that tastes like rust.
It’s a glittered-up lie,
sold in the backrooms of broken hearts.

And the girls—God, the girls—
their youth melts like ice under streetlights.
They trade their innocence for tequila shots,
for a fistful of pills
that make the pain hum softer.
They sell their laughter
to men who keep it in their pockets,
and they never get it back.

This city eats them alive,
chews them up and spits them out
into gutters filled with yesterday’s needles
and tomorrow’s regrets.
The addicts stumble like ghosts
through a labyrinth of decay,
their eyes black holes
that swallowed the last of their hope.

And me?
I’m a drifter, man.
A goddamn drifter in a world
that wants me to be a cog, a gear,
another nameless face in the machine.
I write poems with my teeth clenched,
paint stories in my head
while my hands clock in and out of jobs
that suffocate the soul.

I’d rather roam free, barefoot on forgotten paths,
collecting sunsets and stolen laughter,
but life here is a fist around my throat.
Money, money, money—
that’s the gospel, the hymn,
the god we all pray to with empty pockets
and even emptier hearts.

And art?
Art is dead, man.
No one listens to the poets anymore.
We scream into the void,
and it spits back silence.
They want numbers, machines,
something they can sell,
not a soul bleeding on a page.

But still, I write.
I write because I have to,
because if I don’t,
this world will swallow me whole.
I write for the girls on the corner,
for the addicts with their trembling hands,
for the drifters like me
who still believe that somewhere,
somehow,
something beautiful can grow from this ruin.

But until then,
I’m just here,
a ghost in a cage,
watching the world burn
and holding a pen like it’s the only weapon I’ve got.

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