Performed at Lincoln High School’s slam poetry competition, won first place, April 2023

We’re all flawed. 

That’s known. 

There is one part of all of us that we would hate for others to point out 
because we’ll think about it for the rest of the day. 
It will ruin whatever happiness we had at that moment, 
moving into whatever possible future we might have enjoyed. 
We’d instead point out each other’s flaws than face, even embrace, our own. 

Each generation claims that it will be better than the generation before it. 
It will not fight another war, 

prevent the next one, 

protect its children better, 

show its children more of the world, 

help those around it,

and pay more attention to the planet. 

Hopelessness and flaws, 
it will thrive in the places, 
create the ideas, 
and learn from the mistakes that the generation prior did not. 

If we are products of our environment, if we come next,
how come we don’t feel like we belong to the environment itself? 

We are made of hyper-reality in metal and passive sympathy in polished floors. 
We are the generation of unknowns, hiding behind a persona we want everyone to know. 
We traded having feelings for talking about feelings, 
treasuring memories for sharing them, 
and being in the present for cultivating a presence. 
We clip together montages of women in movies expressing rage, 
hoping that the scroller will interact, 
invoking emotions we have become numb to. 
We tried to create emotion through technology, 
not realizing that “all the lonely people” is an oxymoron we live in; 
the Beatles saw each of us in Eleanor. 

We are a depressed generation with a joyful online presence, 
passive to the present, 
pathetically posturing positivity. 
We plan predicaments to procure photos, 
pining to portray a perfect personage,
but only placating stalkers. 
We come from terrorist attacks and the dot com boom,
hunched backs over wires and acres of oil spills.
The internet is made of micro-events forming micro-generations,
so everything we believe to be true is trapped in a metal box.
Our flaws can move across the world in a nanosecond,
yet only exist within us.
The moment we decided to strive for living perfection was the moment we lost our humanity.

I’m no stranger to this struggle:
Comparison is a helicopter parent, forcing its child to succeed at what it never could.
This world requires us to point out the flaws in each other,
but would we be happier if we owned the flaws in ourselves?