Adolescence

A poem must not mean,
but be . . .
If you do not care what you have to say when the words run out and the body begins its dance which is banned, clothes tossed into the canyon and skin freed of the wrongheaded mores . . .

It is for the children,
don’t you know they fuck too soon and bring babies into our midst before they can pay the bill, get a job to stay off welfare, keep the American mythos of everything in its place, in its own time, they are only children after all and if they have no parental guidance, why not . . .

Is that why we have poems?
To say nothing well . . .
To stay children and once you have money put it on the market and let it thrive so you may keep everything the way it is, you are, I will be stupidly resistant to any change that’s needed?

We are not children,
not even the children
who are given the street to build their own economies, leave the rest of us alone, let the cops lock doors, bar windows as the night shift rolls up the sidewalks with the young strays inside.

(3 March 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander