Not My Role To Play

I see the people when I go out, all smiles to those around, can strike up a conversation with anybody in the town. Every person is a friend to them, small talk flows like a fast steam, half the time they say nothing at all yet know what each other means. It seems they have such an easy time dealing with the day by day, to me that stuff is like pulling teeth, just isn’t my role to play. I see people who just fall in bed with partner’s at a hat’s drop, they’ll smile or grin and suddenly they get some, have their world rocked. Some half-drugged man covered in tattoos is apparently their joy, some tart who’s slept with half of the town, and strips online for the boys... Yet the only ones who gaze at me are the ones who make you pay, the world’s awash in casual sex but that’s not my role to play. I see them walking with their spouses, more of them happy than not, marriage may not be a picnic yet it’s still far more than I’ve got. The idea of knowing a person So completely and so full, seems alluring and yet still foreign, I worry I’d find it dull, since after a few hours I want most folks to go away, it seems so cruel to make a person who has no such role to play. I see them playing with their children, and wish I could have the same, but then all the complication come, rattle around in my brain, a world that will hate then if they are wired like their dear old dad, a school system that indoctrinates, tries to turn our children bad, and women I would have children with look at my check and say, “Nay.” I would have been a good father but it is not my role to play. I see people just smile and laugh at things that they know are wrong, to get promotions, get the money, go along to get along. They pander to what is trending and know that it’s manufactured, but they don’t want to ever be judged, speaking the truth can disturb. But I can’t live as a lying man, turn my soul mottled and gray, I’d rather die then ever go woke, that is not a role I’ll play. I don’t mix well with my own species, there are others much like me, we probably have some role to play, but don’t know what it might be. When what clicks well for everyone else just spins endlessly within, when your life is like a failed sit-com that doesn’t make people grin, you wonder why God created you, and so far, he will not say; or wonder if your life’s a warning, and that is your role to play.