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
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/cory-alstad/the-wound-between-us
License code: G8HV0ODOAWSJMKL6

Published by Kindled

Just your average over-caffinated INFP who loves many forms of self-expression. Writer. Poet. Painter.

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