Tonight's Poet Corner: What Did You Expect?

What Did You Expect?
by Belinda Roddie

You promised insanity,
ignoring the adolescent strings of
profanity, enjoying profit while
forsaking humanity - enduring
onslaughts of complaints so you could
plan a date to your third estate because
you wanted

immortality, but you're so
bleached with your illusion that
reality is pushed away. You think you're
God. In actuality, you know the truth;
you see it in the eyes of youth
drinking from the meager metaphorical soup.

You.
Are getting.
Older.
And grayer. And
colder. Your bones and
muscles ain't the way they used to be.
Your heart won't beat the way
it did during infancy. You'll be a raspy

motherfucker with a bowel issue.
You'll cry to nurses for morphine
and a box of extra tissues, and when you
realize that the hospital is echoing, you'll
understand that while you claimed to be king,
you ruined everything.

You sucked away my future through a straw -
I had to pay for happiness. You
made me live by your imagined law. You tied
the knots that read "repressed." And
now you're expecting us, when you
avoided protecting us, to wipe your
wrinkled ass and do each task
as if you're still directing us.

With what? What knowledge?
What proper education?
What materials or experimentation
did you allow us to have? If it
wasn't feeding you, then it
wasn't worth repeating to you. So we have
nothing to give you, and really,
what else did you expect?