City Lights

City lights,

Please guide me,

I’m just a broken boy who’s far from home,

My fire grows dim and weary in your howling winds

So I hide in dark alleyways

Behind dumpsters filled with my emotional shit.

Emotional shit or devotional shit?

I devoted myself to this flawed version of perfection,

Seeking validation in toothless smiles,

And Botox filled faces.

In places whose only comfort

Is in plastic, perfume-soaked roses,

But never mind that, let’s strike more poses

For online posers,

Who pose the real threat to your sanity, because,

They double-tap in hopes that they will tap-tap that,

And then double back.

You popped your back in the back of that bad-bad,

But I digress.

Lest I make your emotional shit my emotional shit,

Devotional shit,

So devoted to this confessional shit that poetry allows me,

So I scatter ink on these white pages,

Like the black of my soul,

That taints the pureness of my mind,

I guess that’s why they call it grey matter,

And grey is all that matters, when,

These bright city lights dim my vision,

Shine light on my watered down convictions,

Making light of the afflictions that plague my existence.

It seems like life in itself is an existential crisis.

It’s funny how I wrote about living in circles,

But nothing is ever the same,

It’s a lot of people under these city lights,

Thinking that they know your soul,

Like you went and became a stripper,

Put your life on a pole,

 

Well here then,

I have no silver platters,

But you can sip out of this enamel bowl,

Because I have no spoons to stick in your mouth,

I’m trying to eat good,

But alas,

I am a broken boy whose body can not hold onto anything,

I bleed memories of golden yesterdays,

Trying to hold onto diamond tomorrows,

But these diamonds have cut my hands,

Leaving me bleeding out my last lifeline,

 

City lights,

Please guide me,

I’m just a fallen boy who’s trying to go home.

 

– Yaone W J Kgabi a.k.a. Po