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Placeholder is a poem written by Reuben Abrogar and shared with The Ugly Writers under the theme Contrition for the month of August

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Aren’t we all a piece of a puzzle just begging to land on the right shapes and colors

Just testing whether the droplet rippled and the night sky is kidding us, you’ve got to be kidding us

All eyes on me, let me put my head down and you goddamn pray for me

All eyes on me, all eyes on me

The funny story of the boy who quits the unquenchable pain and bloodlust from his wrists and transferred over to those that can overdose not enough to kill

It’s the same old chapter all over again, let my hands feel heavy, mom get the machete and hide it, he’s going insane yet again

Yet what’s inside the symphony of the strings of the guitar that has gotten cut due to age

Pray for me, he said, pray for my soul as he screams the rhapsody of the bohemian

He said to himself, get up, get the fuck up as he trembles trying to grab what makes him stable for yet again

He has a blade hidden in his pocket, he promised not to do it but fuck it, what’s gotten over before is now beckoning once again

Do words and progress really diminish? What’s a joke if no one is in pain, what the hell is happening, what’s the blade in your wallet doing? Maybe slash your eye socket because fuck it, maybe the apathy that has been the facade is now catching up

Maybe I’m totally broke, but damn are we going to joke at a time like this?

Well oh well, what’s a little bit of infinity that makes this finite irrelevance, just call me to tell a joke

What a time to be alive, who’s inside again? If not satan, who?

The stigma of the depressed and the silenced aren’t doing all too well

Find once again the amnesty that makes me feel like I wasn’t insane

Maybe I’m destined to disappear

Because when I’m gone, I know I lived to die and to died to lived

But what can we break to make me all better? Why are the screaming voices louder this time around?

I can’t help it, I have a blade in my wallet that’s in my pocket

And it doesn’t seem to stop,

Stop, stop, stop. I can’t find my way back home

In this placeholder filled with strangers.