Before the ocean’s rise up and take our lives, relax remember it’s only the poor who die.

A disease named F.E.M.A, police look mean under dark goggles, gas masks and darker skies.

Fire’s rise from the death of the industrial age, a funeral pyre to engage the simulation, only in this game you don’t have infinite lives, just patience, with a bureaucracy to split your sides— stop laughing this is how you die.

we grope into the night, to find light or anything to survive, a pipe might suffice for some.

At least a third of my generation understands what it’s like to wonder, what it’s like to wonder why, about life, about wealth, the harmless scams we were fed by the man, that dried up the well.

Look around, it ain’t hard to tell. The fences aren’t to protect pedestrians, they’re to protect the drivers themselves. From the poor swarms on the other side, the 25 to life, ready to jump in and die hards, for a chance to catch a fuckin’ ride out, I’m here to tell you how it is and how we live, get some knowledge of self.

this is how it smells, for me and my family and if I ever want kids…

let the sulfur hit your nostrils and lower your eyelids,

and ask my friends if they’ve ever thought about suicide or violence

“I’m too poor to die man”

We owe people too much, owe our mothers and girlfriends,

Take a hit and lean back, feel the sand grain’s behind your eyes

swallow back black tides, your pride, and know that I am become death.

I’m a warrior who faces the grotesque, dressed in just flesh,

A standoff of expertise, a contest of thrown stones and sand underneath,

with gritted teeth, against poverty and liver disease…

Write hard. Write like it’s the only thing you’ve ever known,

and pick up heavy words to throw, and break bones against the drones and corporate shills, an uphill battle to exhaustion, I cut dead weight and did rhyme drills.

Thought I lost one.

A fighter’s discipline in spite of malabsorption of the rhythm, I hit em, with the partially digested, distorted, acrobatic thoughts… powerful techniques that I was long ago taught, in forests and hills… a great wall between there and here. fists fly under dusty knuckles, bombshells erupt around you, feel the tension in your legs. My name is Charles Dorton, and I’ve brought you to the edge…

of the page.

— — — — — — — — —

Editor’s Note: In the process of cleaning up my writing profile for an upcoming project, I have removed most of my old poetry and fiction. I left this one to remind myself why I write, going forward; For my own entertainment.

— Charles Dorton