Burn Out

When we burn ourselves out, what really happens?
Do we lose our passion?
Or do we just lose?
Do we become hollow shells of what we used to be?
Eggs, cracked open, empty, left on the blue laminex counter that my mother always fought to keep clean.
Perhaps.
But what is worse, is what we do to keep from burning out.
We become selfish, egotistical and complacent.
We also lose our passion.
We allow ourselves one freedom and become addicts.
"Just this one weekend for me", turns into complacency
Forgetting why we began to burn out in the first place,
(Which was to keep everyone else happy)
Remembering why we stopped writing poetry,
And writing poetry again instead of emails and making phone calls.
‘I just want this one weekend’
And it turns into a lifetime for ourselves and no one else.
Pretending not to be indulgent, but inspired
By evocative black and white shots
Or a contemporary symphony
And then we write about it
In the plural of the first person,
So that we can share our individual guilt, collectively.