The New Flawed Philosophy

a poem

Welcome to the viral mess,
our dreams turned to codes of compliance,
high on deliberate false sentiments,
chasing a synthetic flash.

Raised on more than three hundred thousand years of trauma,
now we're just dressed up in neon,
playing our parts in a faulty, modern drama.
this is the new flawed philosophy.

They expect me to wrap my soul in shiny cellophane,
to brand market myself like a product,
but I don't want to be legible,
for the new flawed philosophy.

​I do not know who I am
and I don't wish to be defined.
But if I must,
I'm a constant state of questions,
unwrapping slower than they'd like,
and the understanding evolves, so do I,
keep your new flawed philosophy.

Somewhere there's a cave wall lit by a phone's cold fire,
throwing back a face I keep mistaking for my own.
Plato, I'll grant you the wall was never the world,
nothing I've called real was ever more than flicker.
But does an ideal form even exist in this world?
If the essence was always meant to be grounded,
it has rotted into the static feed,
faulty and complete.
this is the new flawed philosophy.

​I am a neutral thing on this planet,
that would eventually split,
half to the skies, to its one and only creator,
and half to the deep ground.

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I was listening to New Americana by halsey while writing this so the first stanza was influenced by it.