where's the place?

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yowls and growls 
restless gnashing teeth 
hungry for more than time well-spent 
we’ve traded deep sincerity 
for superficial veracity 
a commodified version of truth 
but an eternal betrayal of what’s within

the people in charge want facts but not reality, 
not the internal guts that make up a human 
just the line-by-line bullet points, demographics, 
titles and lists, neatly formatted, 
word-processed, and printed on paper 
but the pulp from the tree has more substance 
than the splatters of ink, neatly crafted into symbols, 
arranged, derived, structured from templates, 
and designed by someone dumber than your mom

we all think we’re smarter than our parents, 
but really, we’re just more lost… 
forced to be more flexible 
our meanderings of mind and heart 
always on the verge of getting somewhere 
close to the place where we think we need to be 
but where’s the place? 
somewhere on a hill? 
a plane of non-physical existence, of consciousness, 
of pure art? 
of joy?
of suffering?

maybe it should be a land 
where you don’t have to play a part 
you’ve been playing your entire life, 
where you can say things you normally wouldn’t say 
and not a single person alive expects you to be anything at all

---

Garbage Notes:

So, there’s frustration in the first section of this poem. It’s a frustration with the faux sincerity that plagues our world. We somehow think if we present the facts of something, then that’s enough. But it’s not.

This superficial veracity is what you see on social media, where people easily present the surface value of what they are, while so easily concealing the truth about who they are or what they live for.

The second part of the poem goes on to critique the idea that we are what we are on paper. Resumes, CVs, fancy degrees, certificates, transcripts, income statements, credit scores, intelligence tests, personality assessments, you name it. There are so many ways to sum up a person. All of this to say here, look, this piece of paper right here says this person is the real deal and knows what they’re doing.

It’s all contrivance, though. It’s all derived from some vacuous precedent, some short-cut, designed by some idiot or group of idiots at a time that is no longer relevant to how human beings should be expected to live today. The world fucking sucks now and everything is harder than it ever was. And human beings cannot be summed up so easily anymore.

So then we get to the titular ‘place’. The idyllic goal of the author. Where is this place? I think we all ask ourselves the question of ‘where is this all going?’ Life is about figuring out who I am and where do I want to be? Right? But the first question that needs to be answered is, what is possible?

I think we often limit ourselves to the expectations of those around us. We cut ourselves off from options or paths that don’t seem realistic or possible given what the people around us are doing.

We all know what it’s like to have dumb parents, shitty teachers, bullshit guidance counselors, bad coaches, and fucked up friends who think they know better than us. We are plagued by bad examples. Faulty prototypes. Deluded exemplars. And this naturally is going to limit the roles we think we can play.

Keep in mind, though, that you should never listen to someone who isn’t living the kind of life that you aspire to live.

If you really consider this deeply, then you’ll see that no matter what place you want to get to, heeding the “advice” of people who haven’t been there themselves, is definitely not the thing that’s going to get you there.

Ultimately, you have to trust yourself and be true to your own suffering. No one else will bleed for you. So you might as well go after that pure thing that you’ve always wanted, regardless of what everyone expects of you.

---

Franco Amati 2023