My Cardboard Balcony

Meta-Discourse by Belinda Roddie when the shit goes high over arched ceilings and the coffee runs dark and dank under superficially scarred skin, you find yourself discussing philosophizing randomosity with a total stranger who cut you in line to get a macchiato whipped cream handjob. he doesn't know who Nietzsche is or even how to spell his name, but he tries to stick blatant nihilism on his baseball cap with a logo of a sports team no one roots for, no one cares for, who the fuck cares about sports? you abhor him, the way he talks, the way he sips from his styrofoam chalice, tossing his shaggy hair back and forth like a windswept teddy bear left out in the steeped tea rain. he tries to educate you about Camus, who was not a fucking nihilist, the Frenchie was called absurd, existential, everything he didn't like, but the meaning is lost in the print you were trying to read in a backhanded volume of honesty while enjoying time to yourself to just th

I know what everyone else will be writing about in their essays, nestled in the stifling Indian summer swarming through our high school classroom. I know they'll be talking about the towers. The two steel majesties, twins against nature, toppling to the sound of a hungry extremist's engine. How they crumbled. How they turned to dust against the New York skies and pavement. I don't want to write about it. It hurts too much. Seems too redundant. And yet my father's photo is there, egging me on.