Wake, adolescent angels.
Your eyes are ice storms,
Your irises are tidal like the cold North Sea,
Your pupils are moonwashed and mad
Like howling western winds.
You look at your horizon,
You inhale stardust and nebulas like cigarette smoke,
Snort powdered mountain snows
Like ******* in the idle breezes of April or May.
Weep, shriek, sob yourselves hysterical
In the darkness of subways,
Beneath underpasses of ***** and spray paint
And endless neon lights.
Jump, leap, drop like stones from melancholy rooftops
Clutching burning cigarettes and *****.
Spin, dance, laugh drunkenly in stairwells,
Assault your forearms with syringes and needles and broken glass.
Cry melancholy saltwater in public toilets,
Kiss the mirrors with fight-split lips
And pick at the broken wall tiles with chipped fingernails.
Tear at the moss on empty high-rise balconies,
Stand high on the railings without hands
And contemplate life and death and redemption and eternity.
Stab, slice, tenderise your thighs with pencil sharpeners,
Fall, graze your backs ****** on concrete,
On gravel, on rough tarmac and asphalt,
Trip, split open your knees in parking lots at 2:45 in the morning
When you’re high and drunk and giddy,
And dreaming of poetry and existentialism and cities.
Sleep, juvenile metaphysicists;
Your mouths are dimming campfire flames,
Your minds are like caves of amethyst and quartz,
But time will go on,
Much as it has since the morning of everything.
Earth will spin;
Faster than your head when you’re high
And your brain is addled by infinity.
Space and time and God
Will remain eternal.
But you
(But we)
Will not.