The new Genre Tourist Punk
is sailing the nation.
Hawaiian shirts and white keds are lining up all around Orlando to see
up and thrifting bands like
Lobster trap,
Lighthouse tour and
Dogs welcome.

Founded in a Starbucks
by Toni and Dash,
two MECA grads one student loan away from selling out and getting involved in
the lighthouse painting business,
The Band: Lobster Trap
gave birth to a whole new genre.
TOURIST PUNK
Toni and Dash decided they needed to provide music that was expensive. niche.
Something unspeakably mundane.

With smash hits like
"This traffic is *******"
And "My name still isn't Joe".
Lobster Trap is flying
up the American top 40
faster than you can say socks and sandals

Sales of "I HEART LOCATION" merch has skyrocketed with every launched tour.
Crowds of L.L. bean boots and visors are Moshing, breaking poloroid cameras over each others heads in a salmon rage.

old school punk fanatics were skeptical at middle aged middle class suits getting into their scene.
until it hit them that they could now throw punches
at every pedestrian who ever cut them off.

"Hi thirsty, I'm Dad." By Land of the Polite
Has been played more times in the last year then any taylor swift song.

Money once invested in college-bound middle class vacationlander spawn is being wisely spend on bands like "discount Polo",
and "Local Diner"

So listeners.
if you spend an obscene amount of money on travel fair, and over priced, cheaply made souvenirs;
Or Work in customer service thriving to see those leaf peepers choked out by their own ***** packs.
Do yourself a favor.
road trip into your local bullmoose
sporting your states name on your chest.
And Treat yourself to an exclusive new album
of TOURIST PUNK.

Twentysomething Emo
looks at teenage Emo
and laughs.

It was something purely aesthetic,
with brain chemicals churning
and wiry bodies yearning

under the guise of straightened bangs
and perched beanies,

skin tight black outfits
parading the dusty grounds of Warped Tour.

Twentysomething Emo is the real deal--
lamenting over high school salad days
because real life is so unsure,

college degrees and full-time jobs,
watching friends and lovers come and go in our lives.

After a long day of responsibility and groveling,
we drive home (or somewhere just as distant)
with our emo anthems blaring through the speakers.

We scream the songs back at them,
truly feeling the words for the first time.

I'm the same age as William Beckett, Adam Lazzara, and Pete Wentz
when they wrote these songs--
and though the bangs have receded
and the jeans have slackened,

I am perpetually Emo.

The unrequited love and the nearing distant future--
it's come too soon.

I hope thirtysomething Emo looks back
on my meandering twentysomething Emo
and laughs--

as he plays the melancholy tunes pouring out of the speakers
with some more of life fading away in his rearview mirror.

This town gets smaller every day.

I've got the world's best kept secret
locked in 2 AM screenshots--
her late night musings over a crusty joint, a crushed pill,
or some ***** cigarettes.

She sends me her thoughts,
fears,
anxieties,
insecurities--

at her most vulnerable,
absolutely the most beautiful.

Her anguish stressed in the digital scroll
(though she doesn't like Kerouac, I let her borrow my copy),
her stained fingers mashing all their hurt and nicotine
into the keyboard--

and her pen aches and her paper stains
with the unrequited love she empathizes with
in the somber pop punk songs that explode from the stereo
she sings loudly on cold and lonely night drives
(I shiver in her passenger seat).

And she made for me the greatest of mixtapes,
her holy scrawl expounding upon a dull grey donut-shaped
slowly fading form of intimacy,
a blank CD--

"This mix is a good time"

and when I jammed it into my car stereo I was illuminated.

She is so cool, she is so punk,
and in her clandestine drugstore car charger thefts,
broken poems,
impalpable aesthetic,
impeccable music taste,
illuminated or even further obfuscated drug trips--

I have the world's best kept secret,
and more than anything, I wish to share it with you--

                                     so she can make someone another mixtape.

I'm so sick and disgusted of writing every poem
                                                    about you.
                                       It brings me close to hatred,
                                  but that is an emotion I don't believe
                                                          In.

Sick and twisted, People are sickened by my visions,
When all I do is lead you out of the cave of oblivion.

  Insinc you walk wearing a mask of your false happiness
Inside you wish not to be a carbon copy that’s why you listen to me

Don't you hear them
failure, worthless, no one loves you

You hear them, i don't
That why were different

I'm sorry, you walk left as i go right
Sometimes i can hear you think
You wish to be like me, different

i showered 4 times on the day you left
scrubbing and scrubbing trying to get you off my skin.
i turned the heat up all the way,
and let the burn take my mind off of you.
i threw out all your t-shirts and hoodies,
and hoped if i erased any trace of you from my sight,
it would erase you from my heart too.
i repeat "you dont love him anymore" in my head
until it becomes monotonous and numbing.
i convinced my heart it was okay to beat without you,
and my lungs that it was okay to expand
into the voids you left in my chest.


i saw you the other day, at some ****** punk concert,
and for a second, i felt a pang of nostalgia.
but like a lightning strike it was gone.
you asked my friends why i don't text you anymore
and they told you the truth:
i don't love you anymore.