Today is your day, you may think it's like any other but truly what day couldn't be. Today is yours and no one else's. From your shoulders falls emotion onto the streets and those around you. Demons scoop up the viscous discharge of happiness from you. They sit on the roadsides, curbs and dustbins. Licking gin from crystal bottles, their lustful eyes fall upon you. And from you, you look back at them. The stare drags you deeper. Down and down you go spiraling, through those realms forged of depressed bodies. An acrid smell exudes from the piles of repression. It's in your nostrils now, through and through inside your body.

You pull yourself out. Dragging out your smile and all things that aren't your mask. For your happiness is not a mask, today is your day. And you'll walk on down those streets further, while those other souls slip around your feet.

- Anonymous Brit

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassidy, I even think of Old Neal Cassidy the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassidy.

mom force fed

clichés

down my throat

so I could throw up

fabricated lies of a perfect family

and after awhile, I craved these

stale and trivial phrases,

I would get cavities from every

vapid expression, the sweetness

of each word wedged into

my gums until blood

weeped and dripped

down my lips, staining the tint.

dad force fed

movie memorabilia

down my throat

so I could throw up

artificial memories of my family

and after awhile, I lost track

of what happened on screen,

and what happened in real life,

each fraudulent recollection

tracing from one eyelid to the next, running away with my sight,

leaving me blind to the truth.