growing up is
so inevitable
to the point where
you only notice it
in subtle moments.
like when you see
the once perfectly glazed over scenarios
that your parents once shielded
you from,
now graded and ugly, years of iron-curtained rust covering it whole, for the first time.
like going to highschool and realizing,
everything is not just a comfortable
sunday afternoon,
where we all love to learn and enjoy your individual merits;
but rather a concealed house fire that a stranger started at your bedroom window,
but calls your name from your front door, saying he’ll save you.
when i was young i wanted to be a singer-
to sing about my childish fantasies- where
the world was all colors, not just monochromatic, and the art of language was interchangeable beyond just its origin, but within its people.
in school we learn about the aspects of originality.
how conformity is better in some circumstances
and how nonconformity could have the same premise, if done the way we were taught.
take this test, take that.
effort becomes meaningless when there’s no rhyme to your reason.
we spew out information from the day we can retain it, then on to the day we decide to spew it on to our children.
regurgitating the ethical analytics of our 9-5 jobs or hobbies until we can go home, indulge our brains on our skin tight routines,
just so that we can do it all again in the morning.
this is not the direction that we were supposed to go in...
when the ****-sapiens started off as hunters and gathers
they realized they needed something easier.
they meant so that they’d have more time to live the lives they longed to.
they didn’t mean to make their lives so comfortable into which they cannot have one,
as we are not ourselves these days
without a phone in hand.
we only take things in that we want to hear.
we fill up the entirety of our minds with pointless ideologies
uncomical celebrities
mixed with discombobulated news stories
the phone between our fingers is so focused in on that we can’t even achieve a longer attention span than a goldfish.
we’ve cast a metal, deceiving hero’s cape over our backs, and a sneering mask over our eyes. the shoes we wear, coated in the the soot we didn’t see on our path,
and the gloves on our hands, in the words of Langston Hughes,
are giving absolutely no protection
against the bearing frost over our fields of opportunities.
how old we are, we could not say.
the days go by so fast when we know not
the aspects of our self preservation.
Poetry Slam for my High School, 2019
