This girl
who stands before you
with just as many fears
as she has holes in her jeans
hates what you have made her.
Lost in a crowd of catastrophic connotations,
other faces see her as nothing
more than a shallow, self-absorbed
20-something who prefers drinking
to dreaming.
Every day, she finds ways
to slit the wrists of stereotypes
so that tomorrow
other 5-foot-tall blondes
can feel beautiful,
unmolested by the media
that force-feeds fakeness
into the mouths of unloved youths
who’d rather be robots
than revolutionaries.
Caught in the death throes
of another
deadbeat town, she
longs to leave
a literary legacy to usurp
the archaic ideologies
that breed anger and apathy
into the genetics of
future generations.
She is the hope families
brought across oceans
when all they wanted
was peace and possibility
before the fear became
making less than 90K
in a year. And one day,
this girl who stands before you
with just as many fears
as she has holes in her jeans
will show you that
pens are still
mighty.
I think I'm seeing some well-chosen revisions in this poem, which I like very much (I've actually written a brand-new poem for Tuesday ... just to let the anticipation build).
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ted. It was great to apply some really nice feedback that made the poem more whole. Can't wait to hear your poem tonight!
ReplyDelete