the space above my ears.

The King of Yesterday

At what point in history did codependence become equivalent to suicidal ideation?

Does no one else smell the sulfur drifting through the city?

If all men were saints, my dad said, we wouldn't have to draw the curtains closed in the evening.

If all men were saints, communism would have worked out in the Soviet Union.

It does prompt the question, though, where were the sick brains born?

What color were they?

It's common knowledge today that the party only really starts when the first person is electrocuted, but then, where's the punchline?

Yes, I ask too many questions when it comes to the skillet of society; it's my most distinguishable trait, I'm told.

I can explain it pretty easily: It is the ultimate power play, knowing the thing no one else knows.

For example, I know that your grandpa gave you three rib bones from the carcass of an ox for your birthday.

You use one of them to push back your cuticles and you play songs with the other two.

All the pretty killers hear your music and they flock to you like flies to light- it's up to you to find out who kills for love and who kills just to be in the movies.

You hope the lover is the curly-haired one who smells like paste and parchment.

He looks like he knows something you don't and that intrigues you.

I don't want to make you feel helpless, that's not my mission.

I'm only making something for you to hold on the days when you want to be called "it."

A pair of rubber gloves so you can protect your family from yourself.

Something to toss over your little siblings' eyes so they don't have to watch you salt the snails.

Get it through your head; if I stopped exaggerating the story, people would stop listening.

If I stopped exaggerating the story, it would sound like this:

"There's this girl and she is so afraid of getting hurt that she locks herself up in a lunchbox and perpetually thinks about what happened the last time she let her guard down just to kill the temptation."

There's nothing beautiful or ugly about it, it just is.

The awareness is there, certainly, but the comprehension is feigned.

Smile and nod, just smile and nod.

Everyone else gets paid at least some sort of salary for existing, but you and I are broke as jokes.

Your promiscuous way of caring about everything will always concern the people who don't have a guillotine blade hanging over their heads.

And that's okay.

Not everybody has to love you.

If you waste all your days worrying that the audience didn't like your ballads, the songs will wither and decay.

If you keep running away from all the young, pretty girls with joker smiles, the soles of your shoes will wear down to nothing and they'll keep being villains even though neither of you wants that.

You have this idea that if the finish line is an overdose, you, by default, are a withdrawal fever.

You've been told all your life that you're a self-fulfilling prophecy, so you put on the permanent Halloween costume.

You've fulfilled fulfillment itself.

The cloudy eraser hits the steel wall in defeat and now the air is full of microscopic chalk filaments.

Pretty, aren't they?

You'd be able to find your God if you quit making up stories about what lives in the dirt under your nails.

We can stop doing that thing when teenagers misbehave and we tell them they'll become nothing.

Of course, we will all say things we regret, but what about the things we don't?

Hey there, Joseph is my name and deception is my game.

It becomes acceptable if you wrap it up in humor and tortillas; I'll never get that part.

Either way, the moon is setting now so it is, therefore, time for me to thank God for everything and go to bed.

It doesn't really matter if you mean it or not, I've come to understand.

Sleep erases all the sin.