poetry is motion

In this world, the one we live in, I can't help but feel as though I am dangling off the back, holding on for dear life. It flies forward with me desperate to keep hold. All that is best exemplified in my attempts to understand the young minds of 2019. Me, a 38 year old grey, attempting to keep pace with a 17 year old pink/blue/bleach blonde. 

Regardless, I am trying. All I can do is try. One of my students informed me of IDAHOBOIT day. An event, a flag flying, people with like minds gathering. I contributed the following:

#ItGetsBetter

If we all sit, determined.

Pondering when life's suck

Was its strongest.

Would we all agree?

High school: a black hole for comfort.

Pimpled and greased,

covered in a thin layer of body spray: Lynx Uber-Angst All-Day spray,

I sit tapping. Tapping. Tapping.

All this unspeakable

Noise kept between

Xeric lips behind braced teeth

Ill-equipped to speak

Emote or dress with any

Truth or honesty due to a

Yearn to just fit in.

My sneakers, too white, too dirty, not absurd enough but covered in a thin layer of adolescent grease-- it shimmers as angst.

The lockers, the cafeteria food,

The getting of boners in gym shorts.

The Misfits shirt and ponytail, dyed fringe, avant- piercings,

The random objects flying through the air,

magnetically attracted to the empty tin can that is my self-esteem.

Thinking, but not admitting,

This is everyone.

All this is nothing.

Everything to a sixteen year old skinny, spectacled, lost boy.

Everything to  a white middle-class heterosexual university bound student with two loving parents.

Everything to this privileged prick supported by every support that can support a teen.

From this vantage, dead center in the middle of a bleached white college-ruled page of a one subject spiral bound notebook, I can see the margins. The frayed edges and violent scribbles out there.

From the center, I barely made it.

How do we expect anyone on the margins to?