My intelligent
design stems
from a
bastard father,
some distant
cancer that
has been veiled
by my mother's
vague assurance.

Her reliance
on normalcy
has been stretched
beyond rationality,
leaving my brother
lying naked and
hungry atop
dusty linoleum.

The chair I
use to reach the
high cabinets
is ravished
by termites,
blind, gnawing
demons dining
the legs to an
uneven swagger.

I do my best
to hold steady
the wobble
while I reach
for the
top-shelf nourishment,
but my efforts
always come
crashing to
the floor.

If our mother's
are all dead
to reality's
insistence, and
the father is
busy neglecting,
then the children
are forced
into hasty education and
schizophrenic survival.

We are nature's
custody battle,
orphans snatched
away by mechanical
hands with
promises of
civilized happiness,
but only through
our avowal
to the Great
Constant Progress
that force-feeds
us all.

These grand delusions
of limitless satisfaction
and permanent acceptance
have become the
basis of too
many existences,
breaking the modesty
of subsistence, and
breeding voracious
desires in
its place.

Our adopted mothers
weep conditioned
tears, but the
owner of our
true womb
howls with the
sincere anguish of
a mourning mum.

We are left
torn between
synthetic content
and actual sadness,
the cold absence
of paternal sustenance
and two mothers
whom we'd rather
reject completely
than commit to one
over the other.

And so we are
left empty, born
in rational innocence,
we have now grown into
callow bedlamites,
marching aimlessly like
forlorn gypsies
through the
faultily chartered
expanse that
designs this
accepted earth.

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