barbeques and disillusionment

The sun shines brightly overhead, as it always has
slow cooking all the chipper contented people, who are in turn
devouring the grilled flesh of their own victims of slaughter.
how good it is to be alive, how sweet it is—to be—deluded.

Yet your skies are clouded by billows of black smoke, rising
from the smoldering ruins of your past, concealing
the radiant sun from your view, leaving you
to languish alone in the darkness, drops of sadness beating against your face

you glance at all those happy people prancing gaily about under the burning sun, smiling
grotesquely like victims of strychnine poisoning, oblivious to the sorrow
you keep hidden away in pill bottles and unseen scars, oblivious to the misery
you would dispense upon them, if only you could--but you can’t

stop gasping for breath as you slowly suffocate in your private bell jar, just drift
into the foggy and disorienting haze of moribund bliss, let go
let melancholia overwhelm you, as you moisten the air with your sorrow
because deep in your heart you always knew this day would come—disillusionment.

sounds always seemed muffled by the dead air surrounding aloof relations
words falling apart without meaning as soon as they parted from fecund lips, and
the world was always painted in colors that seem faded, like the sides of so many
indistinguishable tract homes lining the sun-bleached suburbs of Sunny Southern California.