All little boys need father figures,

Not to be normal or sane. You wouldn’t turn on a light switch without knowing where all the conduits are placed. You grow up with a fistful of hurt, a surge like a missile, without hearing a ‘miss you.’ But one thing is certain, nothing makes you question your integrity more than knowing that your very existence is a burden. You’re a burden just to breathe. I was just a curious boy, Curious George, Curious Cristian. I tried to talk to friends, but the look on their faces hurt just to listen. A burden. “How about a counselor?” Yeah, I know the ins and outs. I’m a soldier. Here, take my money, let me cry on your shoulder. How do you plant your feet in the mud? How do you turn your feelings into comfort? How do you know what you’re feeling is real and not some misguided daydream because you’re weak and, well, younger? I’ve broken my heart into pieces asunder, endured the most embarrassing trial and error in the world to learn how to speak to a lover. It sucks. Questions I wanted to ask, questions that needed answers. How do you express greediness more than leaving a son? Upset because I proceeded to ask them. On the cusp of 24 without ever really knowing how it is to have one. Just shells of people who didn’t want to take up the task. Another week, another meek undercover. Another daydream took a plunge. Now all I want to do is scream. I want to go into the streets and scream until I don’t feel anything. Until I summon beams full of thunder, until I shudder streets full of anger, until my teeth shatter and burst into a dozen pieces of rancor, until you see a beast take refuge on the streets with an anchor, and he won’t leave until sun-up and sunsets over under. Cloverfield breach. I feel mean. The form of speech “hate” leaves me unencumbered, until you learn that my motherfucking pain isn’t something to play with, motherfucker. There’s a bloodbath of ink on this pale sheet. I’m on a smooth pace of spilling, a new space and ceiling. It’s a tragedy that I had to reduce my father figure to newspaper clippings. How my favorite ballplayer scored 30 points. There’s a new wave of emptiness intended for millennials, and I write most of everything in metaphors. Soft explanations, so the interpretation gets lost in translation because as long as I know what I meant, your misconception is void, because I felt those words when I wrote them. 100 years from now, when I’m gone, children in classrooms will be dissecting my verses with no intention or purpose. I scribbled them into quotes, a message deployed through rejection, rage, an affectionate ploy. An inception became a reflection of my own inevitable pain. Because remember, for everything set in stone, there’s a knife where the edges are frayed, irreverent, sane. I clutch an invisible pendant made out of being ashamed. It’s like every portrait drawn of me, there’s a frown on my face. Every individual second is captured in a thousand frames, and those frames are just lost; they never see light, they’re just gray. I have nightmares of being indicted for being different. There’s a judge that looks exactly like me, handing out a sentence in vain. Bail is set at impossible, and the bailiff is me too. At my funeral, I want Beethoven’s 5th set as the prelude. Every physical sentence I mash out is obsession. I’ve invented the abstract, and what’s next is a flash, exposure to quiet. I sit alone at the dinner table, three hours past supper, spinning my index finger in the red wine. Dead silence staring into the glass, as if it’s going to stare back up, and it doesn’t. Every masterpiece I created is crap. I feel my own perfection is lackluster. I don’t know. I’m impossibly hard on myself, and the quality is starting to lack. Quantity takes its place to tackle an impossible task. I’ve tacked on a badge of honor for burnout. I’ve become so accustomed to exhaustion that having energy gives me PTSD. My madness is bottled up, swallowed up by a flask of somber.

I already know what you’re going to say before you say it. It’s non-euphoric, and even if I were to become complacent, it would be out of boredom. What a soreness to wake up out of touch with the world. Yeah, I see your pain, and I raise you my void. I’m hard-strung. I’ve coughed blood into buckets. I’ve sung songs to my lovers. It’s better to have love lost than to… forget it. Making people laugh is a drug, and I love it. I run out of punchlines and realize my life was it. Feeling implicit. You need to be me to relive it. These last two decades confined to the fetal position.”