the anthem of the empty

My mother yells at me for things I already hate about myself.

(And I'm not depressed but I remember it.)

The GPA is slipping off the medicine cabinet, and the 2.7 weeks we have left of high school are sitting in a bottle of pills with a dosage number that tastes like a time bomb.

as if time bombs were really a thing.

Now that my identity's been nabbed, I feel like a juvenile returned home without a Mother's Day gift

or maybe just an unsuspecting teenager who didn't "smell the flowers" 

because it didn't amuse me.

But this is an anthem for the kids who wander in No Man's land,

who temper with the back-and-forth emptiness that doesn't taste like joy 

and certainly doesn't smell like pain.

When the skull that's supposed to be filled with feathers is emptied at Niagra-speed 

and becomes a hollow shell that, for some reason, doesn't carry an echo.

This is an anthem for the feel-nothings who wrote AP essays in the midst of their conscious comas.

Whose morning alarms eat them for breakfast.

Who got too comfortable with the moon and fell in love.

This is for the mental diseases they made out of brain cells and attention, 

for the time the doctor said "It's very common" and that offense blinded 

all the unique-ness you had planned for yourself.

This is for the caffeinated spinal fluid that somehow finds the right hemisphere of the brain.

And the seratonin that gets lost on the way there.

But this is especially for the tender hearts that sniffed seratonin and decided

 it was too strong a drug,

so they gave up on the bodies & brains that asked for it.

For the depression bank, where they keep your carvings and isolated eyes 

and cruddy journal entries because they don't want you to remember 

how empty your harbor really is.

This is for the empty harbors

where the docks haven't seen anything but a venturing sailor who keeps the hope at bay,

because the evidence states that "nobody wants to go there anymore"

This is for the far-fetched analogies that only a handful of people will understand.

This is not an anthem to the depressed 

or the diseased 

or the dysfunctional.

But to the artists 

and the hopeless 

and the underprivileged 

who made priceless things out of money and somehow get caught in the turtle shell of their subconscious.

For those who feel nothing.

And keep filling themselves with air.

And feel nothing.