I wrote this poem back in October 2004 when I was preparing to leave the Buffalo, New York area for Los Angeles. I was surprised by the amount of misgivings I was having about this chance to "reinvent myself" and was thinking about why this was so. The "dysfunctional messiahs" refers to the allure of "fortune and celebrity." Not surprisingly, I returned to Buffalo after eight months of living in what I had come to call "The Land of Artificial People", the San Fernando Valley.

David Kowalczyk lives and writes in the one-stoplight cannery town of Oakfield, New York. His poetry and fiction have appeared in seven anthologies and over one hundred magazines and journals, including Istanbul Literary Review, Munyori Literary Review, Moloch, and The Maynard. He has taught English in Mexico and South Korea, as well as at Arizona State University.

The sky is overflowing with dysfunctional messiahs.
They are young.
They have the eyes of boys and the hearts of kinds.
They are trapped by a ruthless aching for brighter lights, greater warmth, life more holy and free.

Tomorrow they will realize time grows the way we want it to, and that all anyone ever searches for is a place where love is possible.