Catherine Heath
May 2020
How can they say I’m mad,
When so many people
Rave on twitter;
Paranoid delusions
And denial of facts
Commonplace,
And rewarded with retweets.
Is it madness,
Or wrong,
To cling to wisdom
Learned when we were young?
That love
And laughter
Are all that matter?
And they are that
Which
Guide us through the darkness.
To preach a simple truth
Invites hatred
And vitriol––
They demand loudly,
“Off with his head”!
We are the Puritans;
The Victorians;
The Inquisition;
Frightened of bodies,
And yet numbing ourselves
With writhing orgies––
Polyamory;
Nonbinary,
When a simple gaze across a room
Is now a microaggression.
When I was young,
We flew through parties––
Boys and girls,
Laughing,
Flirting––
If you wanted to have fun,
You’d follow a boy straight down to hell,
While your girlfriends
Wrote you letters,
Cheering you on,
As well.
I don’t know about nowadays.
This modern malaise
Of plastic food
And pumped up bodies
That will never feel a human touch
Leaves me dazed.
We ate salami from Aldi,
Ran into the sea,
And short circuited our phones.
We sat on a bench
And took photos
For free
(But we brought our own signs)
And then, laughing,
We stumbled home.
Smoking cigarettes behind the bike sheds,
And sneaking weed into school––
We were no fools,
Just teenagers,
Laughing,
And trying to be cool.
They shouted at our Converse,
While we looked down on their Paul Smiths––
The uniform
Of sheep,
Too scared to be unique.
Emo,
Gay,
Bicurious,
Scene,
We were queens,
And kings.
Do we forget the past
In our race to become infamous?
The most freakish outcasts
Celebrated
As overlords,
Telling the rest of us what to do.
Well I’m through
With my silence––
I will not
Bow down to you.
Credit: Photo by Michael Discenza on Unsplash
