Because your brain’s broke busted bitter beaten brittle blaring and bleak. It’s like that box of wires everyone has sitting on the top shelf in the back of a rarely used closet, a mix of HDMI cables and outdated chargers thicker than Medusa’s curls. Because daily you tiptoe through a babble of awareness even you can’t seem to talk your way out of. Sometimes you can almost behold a crystalline order to the world (a peek here, a glance there, a cheap imitation of truth flickering like broken streetlights in the dim peripheral of your mind’s eye), but mostly it’s just the dense canopy of jittery synapses blocking out any notion of an open sky. You want to blame your parents. You want to blame school. You want to blame God but you don’t believe in God. You believe in unhappiness. You believe unhappiness is a riddle you’ve come to understand intimately, come to know like an old shirt; that misfortune often exists independent of a clear and accountable agent. Planes disappear, love fails, children die. Cause and effect are bedtime stories meant to shield us from the insane condition of being both human and alive. Yes, you’re thinking is as straight as a drunken compass, but the geometry of sorrow is something you would know the shape of even in an ink black room. A lesson always learned too young. A double edged sword if there ever was one.

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Andrew Revie is a poet living in Rockland County, NY. His work has appeared in Petite Hound Press, Tolsun Books and The Night Heron Barks.