Youth
Struggling, seeking, sorting, salvaging:
No Saint to Save—
Building, breaking, blaming, bandaging:
No Bliss to Miss—
Dreaming, daring, despairing, damaging:
No Dark to Daunt—
Making, melding, masking, managing:
When Matter is Batter—
Tomorrow it’ll be The Yesterday,
But yesterday it was The Tomorrow—
The shears that will my future flay
Are enshrined in my past sorrows.
We all lose our minds a little now,
Unless you’re one of the lucky lot—
Where’s a tree with the Unrotted Bough?
Where’s all the fruit that we forgot?
We all lose our minds a little now—
Attentions diverted by a bottomless slot;
The arcade flashes and we wake up as mirrors
No longer to be, and much less to bow—
The self creeps away as the shiny grows nearer:
We all lose our minds a little now—
But Mine I’ve Lost A lot.
A lot.
A lot: Us.
A Lot—
—Us in the Bush of Birth,
A Lotus loafing kindly worth.
A Lotus overlooked again,
Lo, tusk is in reign blindly.
Lo, tusk in hand, lotus unmanned—
Lo, tusk in hand we fight.
Lo, tusk is sharp, lotus a harp—
Lo, tusk in hand is might.
Skin begs no;
Kin cry woe!
Lo, tusk in hand is might:
Dismal the death;
Malicious breath!
Lo, tusk in hand is might—
No matter wrong or right.
I’m filled and I cannot reel release
I’m filled with Us: Lot of unpeace
Each one dares flash like lightning’s sire
Gleamed and Glutted with unchaste desire—
It drips from my lips, how grim, how feckless!
Heathens can be when inventive and reckless
They pry and they twist and the twist does persist
Till limbs out of bent don’t know how to resist
The rebels within Us that, browsing at sins,
Build space for a Lot deep under our skins—
Lost again, now lost a lot: Us Lot since long forgot
We grew backwards, reversed right into rot
So that wrong would find its slot
A chance to delude the Precious Plot
And claim peace as to what’s fought
And demand war for all that’s naught.
Us Lot adjust to backward life,
Us Lot learn liability;
If only by destructive means—
Denial’s its own ability
Delusion a distractibility
Courted through the nights of farce
That force tragedy down our throat
Stifling what sparse sustainability
Was left before the blustering bloat
Lost and so I’ve made love to a howl
Lost and so I’ve screwed raw a growl
And so kneading notoriety into shapes of propriety
And so bored collectively to flourish unexpectedly—
O Sand! Slipped through hands and lost…
O Sand! Its grains, the start of abundance!
O Sand! Bounty for scavengers, at what cost?
O Sand! To our perception an end, a redundance.
We dream of dark horses dappled with light of strange forces
Slithering from sight, chased in the night, caught not quite—
Yet there’s still fight to incite to ignite to claim what’s right and leave the scraps for spite until we reach the height and invite the bright to burn our sight so we may excite in us the sprite the poets recite of the vicious delight in a relentless bite the kind to unite faceless fright and pointless plight—
Let the concrete crumble
Let the foundation rumble and tumble
Fake a prayer with your flickering tongue
For the Nothing Above to fix it all
(If you cannot recognize O Sand
slipping through your fingers,
Perhaps you have drowned in it)—
And we who claim to have found
Before having begun to search;
We must make sure not to change anything
That might prevent what will surely
Come to Appall.
Because clear as day, know it or not,
From the Sand we formed unpeace from peace,
And so turns vicious the Precious Plot—
Because dark as night, believe it or not,
To the Sand we may beg and plead
But the Lotus is lost to Us Lot—
How fickle it all is, our downfall’s dawn is yawning,
As are the warnings that, poisoned by our jaded might,
Only mirror what has by now burned out the light—
Spit out the antidote before it shrivels you to death.
We are an indecisive crisis diverging from piety
Solemnly abstaining from sanity and sobriety.
We will adjust the lens to block our view
Of a coming crash only the survivors rue—
Run, run fast, stumble and fall into the vast
Far from the future, far from the past:
Anything, everything will do
To soothe the uneasy untruth
To satisfy the unquenchable youth
That’s playfully drowning you.
Cover picture by Daniélle Amorim
