Today I got to watch your world shatter. I got to watch karma catch up to privileged people who were handed everything they have EVER asked for. Whether it was from mom or dad, or the respect of their peers - privilege was their birthright. Riches were in their DNA, and their dreams and goals were poured right into their hands.

They dressed in organized fashion at the best schools, waking up in expensive beds and consuming name-brand everything. They were clean cut paper people living in a world where the flames were restrained, where sparking up the smallest glow was wrong or selfish. But forcing religion and rules on youth, raising them to brainwash the next generations to come into walking straight file and raising their hands only to have their ideas and their questions shut down, that was okay. They lived their lives on three hole paper, spilling out a simple and formal vocabulary with a number 2 pencil in neat rows. I was the strange one, coming from growing up on streets that screamed "murder", and sleeping on pool floats in houses that weren't mine. I was strange because my parents were a lonely star and mother earth herself. I was strange because I had short hair and bruises plastered onto my pale body. I was strange but I was glowing. A flame among paper, melting through a world of plastic, of fake dreams, of people living to worship the dollar. But I grew up praising Rudolf Steiner by dragging an old bow across a 50 year old violin bridge. Old bridges became my thing. Whether it was the bridge of an instrument or the bridge that over looked the Ohio River on cold nights in my childhood. I always found an intimate contact in aging art, in abstract paintings, in stained concrete walls.

You never saw that you weren't heroes, you weren't villains. You didn't fit anywhere into a storybook. You were simply a fire alarm that was preset years before you ever opened your paper mache mouths. You were never close to saviors. You only ever were a preprogrammed clock on a computer that was running out of time. And no amount of money you were handed by your parents could ever give you a life that was something real. You all existed while we were all truly alive. We were the flames that broke the filters, the craters that ripped the moon's perfect frame, the paper lanterns lining the streets for those we loved. The strings in our hearts spelled out "tragedy" and our organs were branded with suffering. The same suffering that made men like Robert Frost and Lewis Carroll so great. The same suffering that forced us to stand on higher cliffs than the rest of the kids our aged. The same suffering that attracted us to the blood that dripped from our noses as we gazed into dirty broken mirrors. While you slept the night away, we were up all night. We had demons to fight. While you were reading about people like Margo Roth and watching the life of Effy Stonem, we were living the moments in real time. We were the underground, what you called "wallflowers." We were the infestation that held the walls of your home together. While you made friends with the high classed city officials, We became personal friends with karma. You were the class of a higher and more expensive education, we were the class of "We Made It."
the only difference is that you won't walk the stage responsible for molding your plastic frames, and filling your head with wide ruled paper that had pre-written your life for you.

You bought it, but we made it.