How am I really doing?

How am I really doing?

How am I really doing?  The kind of question a mother would ask a son,

If she were not so afraid of the answer

I am a continent of miserable, Desolate in an ocean of fail

Gurgling brine through this oxidized throat and bubbling it up through nostrils

My daughter is a buoy of joy bolted feet to this P-town shore

For crabs and squalor riddled with barnacles of every scarred monster

Of my existence scavenging to eat whatever is left of the salvageable happiness

Burrowed down into my hull

Sophomoric teenage cranial chemical angst depression is a distant mirage

This is adult contemplated structural grief baked on ineptitude to swallow hope

Engineered into this system of pipes and deep-well blood pumping crude truths

Through the manifold with the gauges pressed to caution areas shaded in red

Blowout preventers are on manual detachment with no cushion in the shaft

I am depressed to the core of this life I dare not complain or accept

I neither love nor hate, but wallow in a tank of apathetic numb jellyfish bath mate

Heart tickles, I fantasize about sucking gun barrels void of homosexual undertones

Focusing rather on the sweet release from this purgatory in passing thoughts

I am a broken man, coughing up blood daily like a balding man finding shreds of hair in the shower drain.  I see this death in me bellowing for interaction, solace that this Guinevere court is not mocking me round the table again

I yearn to find the will to hate.  I strive to be able to say my peace.

I beckon to be believed and yet I am standing, teetering as this buoy waiting for the next hurricane to run me asunder face in the sand cringing to lick this dirt out my implants

I can not remember the last time I had an untainted excitement, a laugh, a just me moment that was not infected with this viral disdain for my own emotional construction or flawed rungs.  I want to go back and pass school yard.  I want to be loved just once, connected in a trump of all this disconnection. 

How can it appear so easy for so many others with their heads above the water?

I am so short and the surface is a transposition of lights and grief and I can not fathom to breathe this blanket gills cloaked. 

Truth is my little girl is my only oxygen down here.  The only fuel keeping me alive.  What grown woman would want to dive-live in this Macondo mire, when I do not even want to be here myself?  Fourteen years in prison, but what will I do once released?