Youth

I’m whittling away blocks of spare time with the bleary-eyed philosophies of grossly mislead philanthropists
Building a cedar box to house all of my intangibles,
A velvet lined coffin for the theories and concepts that I could never materialize.
Methodically I’m removing steel shovel by steel shovel full of soil and red dust to reveal a bottom
That isn’t even there.
On my hands and knees digging through the raw earth with my fingertips, separating roots like lovers locks,
Patiently sifting through Nietzsche and three feet of Socratic method searching for a place for my bones to call “home”.

My head dries, my hair, inside the vertebrae of poets with whisky on their breath, dysfunction and instability floating in their lungs,
An indefinite hostility that’s unintentionally evangelical in nature.
They too have buried themselves in the grit of irresolution.
(Kerouac, Plath, Keats and Clare) tunnelling like earthworms defining themselves not by the problems they cause with their void of purpose or illustration
But thriving on the debris that hit their mislead lives like shrapnel 
Frantically bombarding blank pages with meaningless pencil impressions
Racing the calendar to Christmas and birthdays
Scraping back sludge and cobwebs to reveal a blurred expiration date.

Unwittingly thrust onto a pedestal of leadership and God’s
Un-whole, un-holy, and collectively incomplete they lead us blindly into love and lust and logic,
Logic?

Moses didn’t give a fuck about the Ten Commandments.
His people needed structure in the form of lovers’ obligation
He was scared shitless and he didn’t have a clue.
Moses was the original poet, propagating pronouns and manipulating mindless masses of men
Moulding mobs in to “groups” like clay, worthy of worshipping an absent creator.
All of our knowledge is sourced beneath the earth’s crust.
Presidents, philosophers, poets, priests, preechers, prophets, terrorists and novelists are resting in their cases like clarinets without their reeds.

Still we daintily comb through their works, holding them by weathered leather spines
Clinging to printed wisdom like the landing gear of the last chopper out of Saigon
Desperation woven into the minuscule spaces of my bookshelf
Shouting profanities at sixes and sevens, stubbing toes on the same damn corner.
But answers to questions never provide solutions to your struggles.
Industry pumps 92 gallons of toxins into the ocean annually, but what will you wear to prom?
We’re narcissistic babies, still feeding from the breasts of egocentric forefathers,
Stalking illusions of romance and the ghost of balance through wooded thickets like a spooked elk,
Reaching for anything that can pull our pudgy infant hands out of the dirt and into proper adulthood.