Porcupines (2019)

You’re…

Purporting you’re a normal guy, performing more than sorta fine.

I’m sure in store there’s more to find: I’m poring over your disguise,

I’m peering through your tortured eyes, like portals toward the door you hide

before me forms a more defined portrait of your mortal mind

I’m boring through your fortified, fortress of assorted lies.

Sort through what you sorta like, adore, support, mourn, glorify

deplore, abhor, or more despise. Less pins and needles – try swords and knives!

More thorns entwined through your insides, than spines aligning porcupines.

Explore and tour, then formulize: You’re torn inside and mortified.

Record the sores, immortalize the moral storm that’s borne inside:

You question if there’s more to life, or in the end you’re born to die

before this time you swore to fly, now how can you afford to try?

This edifice enormous so you’re hoarding all your dormant time

This precipice precarious; it’s pestilent, it’s perilous Your

intelligence feels scarce and this|huge deficit is scary shiit!

(this burden I can't carry it...)

I'm Self-aware with no self-confidence; won’t dare to claim I’m competent.

Can’t bear to take a compliment — I barely think I’m cognizant!

Compare myself in college with top scholars ‘cross the continent.

The consequence is constant stress – acknowledge your accomplishments:

I’ve conquered complex contour “ints”, convolved pics with Laplacians,

took. Hermitian conjugates when going from some bras to kets,

computed those Lagrangians, dropped knowledge at a conference;

yeah – project topics, concepts, mixed | with assonance and consonance.

In the fall I’ll start my doctorate – plus, ain’t these bars the hottest shit?

Yeah… so… it would seem this clearly contradicts

the laundry list of problems which | constrain my brain in knots and twists;

Those constant thoughts I’m bothered with - I. throw. Out. The. hypothesis!

Imposter? That’s preposterous! I. must. con.clude. the. opposite!

I have a brain, now I’m convinced | the objective’s not squander it.

…and yet I can’t help pondering – preponderance of thoughts like this,

mind wanders somber off a cliff! So awareness, no; self-conscious, yes…

(Gotta exercise some common sense…)