Pete, Jane, Frank, and Laura

Pete’s hair is a long, tangled mess of avoidance.
he thought not combing it would make him pure,
but just another insecure
rationalization.

Tried to beat anxiety with doped up wuwei
and ended up with a disjointed lot
of revelations turned juvenile
understandings.

Still a bum kid staring down whiskey in his veins,
swerving in between home and fucking up.
He’s relational and estranged
just like everyone else.

Nothing more embarrassing than being alone,
Jane feels like the reason they make these ads
for singles and flatter stomachs,
but she won't deign to click.

She finally read the Word of God in college,
from a tiny book with a green cover,
most often surreptitiously,
desperate for a way out.

Always seems to be a chasm between her lust
for attention and her need to be saved.
She’s relational and estranged,
just like everyone else.

Frank’s flock is made of mostly irrelevant thoughts,
hypotheticals that he never chased.
That's quite a brutal way to die,
dreams replaced with complaints.

One unending soliloquy from mind’s pulpit,
he would tell everybody he loved them
if he could only find out how
to phrase or frame it right.

Sunday night hypertension with weeks to dawn and
universes to down and then piss out.
He’s relational and estranged,
just like everyone else.

Laura stomps in each day, saying ‘I hate my life,’
cutting her school lunch with a plastic knife.
Sadness is the old, bad habit
that she could never kick.

She can’t remember which helplessness to unlearn,
whether some bitterness is well deserved.
Orphaned into a false, mundane,
mediocrity sect.

Took up running for all the symbolic reasons,
and found only another way to ache.
She’s relational and estranged,
just like everyone else.