It’s the wicked spirits,
Keeping any participants on a short leash.
A sensor fused into the back of our necks
Feeding into our veins as we  become one
With anything
They tell us to be.

Taxing pools of retiring faces
Assuming what was best then
Is best now.
And if we go against their stale routine,
That has been
Long.
Since.
Dead.

“We’re asking for it.”

Burn any pages we wrote our plans in.
Because they already know what's good
for us.
All the decisions we’ve ever made
Weren’t ever ours.
And if we were to turn our backs
On what they say.

“We’re asking for it.”

From birth we were programmed.
To take the path already made for us.
To wash away our personalities
And preserve our opinions.
To conform to the colorless normalities
They paint for us.
As if we were never to be
Anyone else
But
  everyone
  else.
And if we were ever to think
That we are okay
On our own,

We are asking for it.

Our youth is spiraling down
Into a “greatness”
That will gnaw at our flesh
Until nothing is left
But the raw material underneath.

“Blank and beautiful.”
Only beautiful
If 
  In
   Unison.

And they will smile
In knowing how great of a job they performed
On raising
What they
could not  be.

And we will sit alone at night
Clawing the lavender circles under our eyes
Wishing it would have been
   Different.

But it’s too late.
And now we’ve become the tracks
They put us on in the beginning.
Pushing us along
Until we all came out of the tunnel
As the same model train.

Only because,
We were too afraid
To be the ones
Who
asked
for
it.