Something is fundamentally wrong.

Unless his blue eyes were created only to look
Downward,
At a ground that can hardly support their murky weight.
Unless it is the norm for his spine to declare a strike
On the rest of his feeble body,
Bending him lower than his grief.
And unless his skin
Being devoid of hue
Is something ordinary for this
Aching soul then

Something is fundamentally wrong.

So, she taps on his back with a rap of her pencil and asks,
As soft as a laugh but with none of its humor,
“Are you all right?”

And is he?

When the sides of his brain exhibit sibling rivalry on a earth-shattering scale,
Two forces like hurricanes
Whip doubt and fear over
His holy kingdom of thought, its citizens, emotion,
Shaken.
Left only to shout, “Anarchy!” to a unrelenting sky.

When the people around him are nothing more than
Disturbing monsters
Their roars of insults and savage claws of hatred, are
Scathing swords of conquest over his self.
Backed into a corner, he mingles with
His own schizophrenia, wondering what ideas
External to him
About him
Haunting him
Are real.

When his imagination, once white clay,
Can only form itself incorrectly
Abandoned by its sculptor
Who took up soldering gun and torch
To form a metal
Reality.
And the vivid paint of his passion
No longer vibrantly splatters his soul
And his life
They are separated into primary colors
Poignant ghettoization
Of the cruelest kind.

When
All things are considered.
While it is admirable, it is laughable, for this girl to have rational
To not have touched his palpable pain
To not have seen the fallible animal he has become
To have asked this self-destructing cannibal
Of himself
To himself
By his self
If he was all right.

Because something is fundamentally wrong.

But with a flick of his wrist
His dismisses his own salvation,
Pounding like a fist but without the punch.

“I’m fine.”
He says.
“All right.”
She says.
And they move along.