| We are often our own demise and
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| I am becoming procrastination
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| You are so often so wrong about you and you don’t even know it
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| Self-identified as particleboard, papier-mâché, duct taped
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| And you are wrong, and right, and confused
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| It’s complicated, but so is a star
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| A flower, a quasar, a friendship, a marriage
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| May we be refuge for the complicated and
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| As for me, well, I have zipped up my emotions into this dusty duffel bag that
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| I’ve aptly named poetry
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| And I’ll be on my merry way as soon as my pride turns me loose
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| And unmangle the last morsel of manhood I could produce
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| Ma’am, I seem to have misplaced my confidence
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| Last place I’ve seen it, it was at the altar of your love and
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| It’s complicated and
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| I am becoming… complicated
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| We may scratch ourselves raw to erase the image we were made in
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| Smoke, snort, sex or drown out the silence
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| We may waste our life savings on makeovers
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| To try to rhinoplast our daddy’s nose away
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| But no nip, no tuck could cut away the sense of obligation
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| We are becoming what we are not
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| But what we are is inescapable
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| You are a masterpiece fighting to be a silly selfie with a hideous filter
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| You are heavens handmade calligraphy
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| Slumming it among papyrus fonts
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| You are the complete and perfect works of a perfect and eternal poet laureate
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| With a laundry list of identity issues and
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| Sometimes your plumbing don’t match your urges but
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| Your femininity it forced a force field that protected our posterity
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| Your masculinity it mustered up moxey to conquer mountains for our families
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| You are the rightful heir to not just a kingdom
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| But a universe and you have your daddy’s eyes
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| Stop being so traitorous
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| You are revelation revealed
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| Pyramid constructors, conductors, conduits of lightning
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| Yet you speak, and you breathe this arsenic carcinogenics, and it causes car
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| sickness
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| These scars are our witness
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| To love hard is hard living, but it’s life
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| It’s who we are, it’s messy and uncomfortable and complicated
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| But so is a star, parenting, childbirth, love, and us, and us |