(A 'thought piece' I wrote in high school)

Ok, I'm not paid to think (like the TV shouting heads), I have no real voice (vote), and certainly no credentials - but I'm as invested in America as any high-school citizen can be. I've pledged allegiance 3000 times (hhmm.. do they doubt our loyalty?) and when it comes to loving America, I'd have to say my classmates and I are at the center of the spell.

I'm afraid we're growing up in the age of hate.. the age of phony outrage where each position large or small is high noon and violence is underfoot even when policing ordinary citizens.

We won't address the multitude of old problems in this new age.. we'll just unleash a marquetry of half truths to dispute the proven until unreasoned arguments reach their paranoid fullness.

The real world is alarming enough - lets just push that away and ignore it - while we're at it lets **** shame the poor, the old, the sick, the unemployed, the hungry and the hand of mercy.

I realize America was never one moral atom bonded for better.. but those anvils that forged us appear neglected or forsaken. I'm afraid what's happening now, what we're seeing and hearing now, is a symphony of erosion - that by the time I have any say at all, the middle class will be gone - america turned slum - where even the voice of despair will be turned traitor.

We'll only be able to see our greatness in museum souvenir shops where nothing is affordable and everything is made elsewhere.

I love the sterile validity
The wavering insecurity
The disparity
of all its complexity

I love the strings
that make fingers bleed
Conductors
who slobber down to their knees
Epic chords that slander like a gentle breeze

What's not to love like the ghost of Mac and Beth
The accumulated end funds
that go not to the bereft
The music like vampires that have no death

Thank God for my joy
that classical dispelleth
My light it distinguisheth
The catch breath as clear as crystal ****

Searching for Galileo,
    the race to be first home,

In a sea of patients
    we climb the probability tree,
    walk upon the shore collecting
      memory shells,

We win the little wars,
     lose the big fight,

These windows are breathing apparatus,
     this ceiling, a blur of tungsten sky,
     rain, tears, weep,

To rest near to you,
     the technicolor sleep,
     and I died with you,

All farewells are sudden.