Everyday Life Is Just Another Poverty Poem by Patti Masterman

Everyday life is just another poverty
In-between the end of one tragedy
And start of the new catastrophic holiday:
Alone in graveyards, you're watching
The flowers slowly wilt; and you can feel around you
How everyone is abandoning, being sucked away;
Even the unknown, silent ones, meditating there under the sod.
But the lawns are well kept, to prove how pleasant,
How harmless a fellow death really is.

A selfish sentimentality
Awakens and hoards all the moments
Knowing that they disappear too soon;
Everyone is leaving
Whether it has become apparent yet or not
And self is a suffocating construct, of a fake
Suicidal reality, a diffuse spreading dishonesty
Because the older you get, the less you can pretend
That death doesn't exist, that things still make sense.

There is a pathetic clown
Whose lower lip is always ready to tremble
When his dreams are taken away;
He can no longer keep the children happy-
In fact, he can't even keep them alive,
From one death to the next:
And when the world has been filled up with the dead,
There will be no room left for the living.

No, they aren't sleeping in peace;
They've just left behind a numbed, frozen horror
They are only ended, like a movie ends-
And then the lights go up
Showing all the tear stained faces
And you stumble from the theater, sobbing
While telling yourself you'll never be fooled;
Never again, but even saying it,
You know it's just another lie;
Because the exit door is just up ahead
And it's the only way out of the theater.