Nevermind

two.

Beauty is kitsch, and love

Love is black licorice rotting on the shelf

In the 7-11 off Highway 101

We want the red dyed chemicals twisted

Into ropes of silky, sticky,

Nostalgic

Willy Wonka dreams

The irony of a tattoo-clad

Teen spirit

With all the enigma of menthol smoke

Heavy on his decidedly hunched shoulders

Clutching cheap whiskey in a paper bag

Who grapples at youth and

Feigned intellectualism

Who mocks what he won’t understand

Whose face is a mirror

Whose future is bleak

Who chews on a strip of sickly, sweet

Candy, on the empty 2 a.m. street

We are the Saxons

Ripping Romans to ribbons

That would destroy even ruins

Of their tragic heroes

Their starry gods, and chariots of fire

And bloody from battle we wrap ourselves

In these dark ages

Warm our hands beside the pyre

We sit in pepto bismol, dismal

Pink cafes, staring

At pseudo-impressionistic nudes

With the neon lights of laptops littering the room

And ponder poets

Grasp at the melody of Eliot

The truth of Ginsberg

Grasp at the pain of Plath elusive as smoke

Freedom is a noose to an army of jaded

Twenty-something cynics

Whose vulgarity, whose angst

Whose alleged clarity goes unseen

Amidst the white noise

Of generations X,Y,Z…

Nothing is more shocking here

Nothing more obscene

Than the woman sat next to me on the bus

Silently crying.