Smile

Why is it that I constantly feel like a let down; as if everyone in my life was expecting something from me that I can't give them? I find it strange to feel this way because my entire life I have worked so hard to be unselfish and fulfill others' needs before my own. I have always been the one to make fun of myself for a laugh and let others do the same to me without taking any of the ridicule to heart. I always recognize when people are having an off day and I try and make them feel better. At work I bottle up my emotion because I know that it is not a customer's fault that I'm having a bad day and I don't like to take out my anger on employees.I'd rather spread happiness over annoyance. I gave so much of myself in my relationships with others to the point where I feel that maybe I don't have much more to give.
Is that the case? Have I simply shared so much of myself and tried so hard to be exactly what someone needs that I just have nothing left to give? Maybe I have become selfish of my time and my feelings. I just wish I could shake that feeling that nothing I could do would ever be good enough. I wish I could stop letting everyone down and just give them what they need. I just don't think I know what they need. I don't think I know what I need.

I just want to see a smile every now and then.

Shared

Everyone in this room will die. Not right now. Probably not tomorrow. Probably, tomorrow, everyone will be back in this room. But all of us will die.
That's probably the only thing we have in common. Or maybe not. Maybe we all love pizza, or something stranger. We have all seen the same episode of Three's Company. We have all loved someone or something. We have all cried. We were babies once.
But I share nothing with these people, or rather, they share nothing with me.
Except that they are in this room.
And we are alive.

Pavement

I scuff my sneakers as I pass them
stumbling past like a sputtering car
I listen as they sputter words
words of repitition, decrepit and crumbling
crumbling like the sound on a broken record
a broken promise, a trust misplaced
misplaced keys to a deserted house
a deserted friendship
I have no friends, I have the night instead
the night which is filled with character and emptiness
I am a character witness to the murder of one
the one who sits on pavement in the night waiting.

Cigarette

She flicks her pen as if ashing a cigarette and leans back in her chair. Her hands grip at the armrests like she is preparing for impact and her mouth hangs open in a yawn. I'd like to turn off the volume right now and imagine that she is screaming. She's in an airplane, confined in a cheap plastic seat, three to five seconds from death; skyrocketing, plummeting toward earth. Her high-pitched screams are drowned out by the others around her, begging for some higher power to save their lives as the engines fail one by one. Eyes bulge and water; fingernails dig. The oxygen mask bursts out from above her straight black hair and dangles before her, occasionally smacking her in the face. I'd like to imagine that the last thing she thinks about, right before she hears crunching and shrieking of metal and is engulfed in a jet-fueled fire, is every single time she flicked her pen like she was ashing a cigarette.