Ben Bonkoske

People either love you for being an outsider (mixed up with drugs, sex, and lies) or hate you for being so alike them (boring, sober, honest). They basically love a failure and hate competition. They would rather watch a life waste away than to be belittled by an academic overachiever. In some circles, it is reversed. For instance, Dress Rehearsals. I will never fit anywhere I sit. It is not just that people will love to hate you. It is the deep depressing ocean of creating an identity that is worth living, or more importantly, worth reading. I was once a dancing smoking poet. I don’t know what happened but I’ve gone flaccid just to be happy. I’ve given so much away. Nothing gold can stay. I have gone black and I don’t ever want to go back. I’m scared, ok? I’ve been through multiple self-defense classes that have left me with tattered veins. It was love at first sight. A misfit not known to these parts. Go away. Nevertheless, it is always here, on the cusp of something great that I throw everything I’ve worked for away. I had just became so used to everything easy going my way until I died a little inside. Let’s raise a beer to the dead poet who drowns in his own liver. The smoker who died of cancer. The opiate poster child. The drug of love that has started wars. I am no longer a lost hunter, I am a man of peaceful wonder. Hopefully, (as I have discerned with my writing) I will arrive at the same conclusions and vast philosophies that will keep me awake at night with delight that I would high. Dreams are beautiful things. A nightmare in waking life is good poetry. I’d rather be madly insane than happily inane. But no one thinks anything is original at the disposal of dopamine. It is just the blanket statements that capture everything so wide and vast that they can mean anything to anyone. I know, two novels deep and I’ve gathered a few great sentences worth remembering.