Dear World, Love Youth

Dear World,

You’ve made mistakes,

Oh God knows,

And you want me to learn from them

Like you did,

So I won’t end up as miserable as you are.

But I think, at times,

You forget

You’ve got a million years on me,

And that’s about a billion mistakes

With a trillion lessons,

That my newborn brain has to take in.

I can listen, nod,

Ten-four, over and out,

But maybe I don’t want to.

Maybe I don’t want to pretend

I’ve lived what you have.

I haven’t.

Because of you sometimes I feel like I haven’t lived at all.

So stop your noisy spinning for a second

And listen.

Here I am, at the edge of my tiny eternity,

And I’m telling you,

Shouting at you,

That I am not going to walk through it with your timeline tied to my belt loops,

Dragging behind me like cans on a newlywed car.

History will repeat itself, I promise you.

For how can I hate what became of your future,

When it’s what I call my present?

I don’t know

Where the banana peel lies

Or when my foot will chance upon it,

But I’ve listened to enough of your stories to know

That on that day I will slip

And fall

Into your joyful misery,

Satisfied dissatisfaction,

Hopeful cynicism.

Like you I will drape it around myself for comfort

And with you I will drape it around my children too,

And they will struggle against it as I once did.

They will gasp for living air

While our love for them keeps us from untying their bonds.

When they escape, they will walk away from us

And we will jog alongside them

And shout for them to tread gingerly;

They don’t understand how many banana peels speckle the sidewalk like landmines!

Oh how naturally I will join you.

I will become you.

But until that day,

When my life melts into yours,

I will walk on

With my ears filled with beeswax

Against your cautious Siren song.