We are the wretched, inconsequential filtrate of people who know who they are.
We straddle these paths with the same insobriety that we relay Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in.
The streets of Thimphu,
Where we trudge through a beach of cigarette buds and smog of heavy exhalations,
Waiting in line, still in drunken haze, for fried fish by Viva city;
Looking up every hour to hear a fight out-breaking with shouts like:
“Inna Jedha.”

There is more anxiety than true dreams in our conversations,
From the former, we have cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, fights, and mental illnesses,
and from the latter, only misfit fetishes, fantasy, hobbies, and habits.
And when you ask a serious question,
We tell you, without irony, and never dishonestly,
Cliches and appellations like:
“What do you want to be?” met with “Successful.”
“Where do you want to be?” with “Home, wherever that is.” And
“Who is your lover?” “Someone special."

You would be wise to not attempt to peel these deep psychic labyrinths of self-preservation,
This may seem like a Matryoshka mystery
For there is stratum upon stratum of confusion
without a central location.
No psy-che to distinguish any of us from anyone else, living or dead.
We are the children of contradictions;
We spent 6 hours a day in alien classrooms learning in English,
And then one or two in Dzongkha,
Then we went home to speak to our parents in a third language.
We are the children who could not write biographies of our parents.
As a start, we would not know which language to write it in.

We are the children that were chastised for loving the internet,
And falling for K-pop heroes,
Or bikini clad California girls.
They said there were better role models at home,
And when we asked who they were,
They told us to look around,
When we did, we found that even the language being forced on us,
Was just some bureaucrat’s imagination.
And our heroes were off in some archery field getting drunk
and hitting each other with arrows,
Or embroiled in some gangshit, fighting between Thimphu, Babesa, Sabjibazar,
Lungtenphug, Dechenphug,
Each hero himself just like us straddling the rickety road of identity.

And look at the hypocrisies which have claimed a few of us:
They said we were too young to make our own decisions
To choose what subjects we wanted to read in high school.
And then, when some of us strayed and found ourselves against  a wall,
Where was their societal compassion to us indecisive children?
Then there was “zero-tolerance” and our friends just left,
We rarely saw or heard from them again.
They solved delinquency by displacing the delinquents,
From our classrooms, where we controlled each other,
To the streets, from where they were taken,
And made men of over night.
When we said we were depressed or anxious,
They said we were old enough to deal with it on our own,
But when our friends hung from ceilings or floated away from perennial highs,
We were once again indecisive children.

We the happy people of the world:
Over and over again, again and again,
All over the internet,
All the textbooks,
And from the mouths of every foreigner who
Visited Thimphu, Paro, and Punakha,
Who never ventured to Samtse where half the children live in poverty,
Who never saw the expropriation of workers of Babesa,
Who did not see as we did, the great exodus of old peoples from the capital,
Never seen or heard from again.
So when we said we were not happy, they said it was just us.
They said that to all of us,
And none of us talked,
We accepted that we were not meant to be happy as our friends or family are.
This we did to ourselves,
But we only mutilated our own identities because
We did not know anyone else who was not happy.

The puberty of our nation,
Came when our leaders,
Put Don Draper and the Mad Men to shame
And packaged HappinessTM
And sold it off on some obscure anti-capitalist stock exchange.
With puberty came our stirrings and wet dreams.
Occasionally we whispered to ourselves how happy we were
And stroked our cocks till they well off our walls, off the Atsara’s heads,
Off the entrances where they used to hang.
And as these phalluses fell,
We started talking to each other:
“fuck, that 6-in circumcised dick by my house totally fell off today,”
“Oh yeah? You’re unhappy too?”
“Same la.”

Over cigarettes, we talked,
“Dha the government just raided the place I bought cigarettes from,
Can I bum one?”
“Of course la.”

In cities all over the world,
Where we were sent by government-approved agents,
We talked over manual labor and the Bracero experience,
“Dha I miss some good shakam.”

And with all these conversations,
We realized who were truly were,
We were the last shearing headache of
A feudal hangover.
The pioneers of the global age.

We were the ones to figure out
How to play Yak Legbi on the Theremin or the Ukulele.
We were then climbing the ladder to an open world,
We were the refuge of an old culture,
Given way to a newer, global one.

We are the spokespeople to the rest of world,
Who ask us about the HappinessTM policy
Or about what happened to all those people we banished in the 1990s,
“Why did you do that?”
We are the generation tasked with finding ways
That would not conflate happiness with Trump-esque immigration policies.

We straddle these paths like we were hiking up the Tiger’s Nest,
More famous now than ever before.