Death of the Authentic-Self

(Best with sound on)

Small talkin'
  People dropping their story in resumes

I don't want to know your
  Graduating rank
     The prestige you think 
         comes dripping off words
Words I never asked for
   Like a moving target for some
      Narcissistic folk-lore
They're just measurements on paper
    Recycled on every ear

Where are measurements of the heart
    weighted in a person's authenticity?

When did we become walking meal tickets
    To punch the card and compare trinkets with?

Authenticity, like children's dreams run off to die
    Did it too floo over the coocoos nest?
Run off to Nevernever land
    Separated from soul
Leaving us lemmings as wonderless adults
    Too vain to trade poetic refrain
        Once stamped on our hearts
    Sliding back from sleeve to cage
        Steel doors closing,
    Frozen by mere possibility of rejection

Rejection: the brand of a collective childhood trauma
    Reduced to outputs costing our mental health
        Just speeding us down the lonely highway towards an early grave 
         and a canned obit

How can you know what you don't know you're missing
     Beautifully painful possibility 
         that the world should fall down and mourn for
Weep for the creatives that could have but shall never be
     Buds before the light, mowed down by corporate goal posting
Endless authentic selves that died measuring their resume     

O' how we've forfeited idealism 
   for surface level platitudes
Dealing in transactional falsitudes
   Those same festering narcissistic attitudes
Aging masks cracking deep as the San Andres
    The poorly feigned un-shattering farce