In the bloom of youth, we were all awkward and weird
and contrived in our own inexplicable and ineluctable ways.
We were all sunglassed fictions, heroes in our own heads
and less than that in the slow gnaw and chomp of reality.
We might croon, leather-jacketed, about the dawn before a disinterested audience of wights, hollow-eyed and resigned.
We might jam on a Casio keyboard atop a file cabinet
and hope, idly, someone, someday, might eventually get it.