Teenage angst
Is what the grown-ups refer to it as
When we scream and cut and cry and starve ourselves.
Freedom
Is what we teenagers label it
When we battle through the chains of deceit adults call love.
Hopeless, then, we become,
When we drink until the world is always midnight,
And when the sun rises our minds see shadows that grown-ups call hangovers.
We have to learn, they say,
When we make what they call mistakes.
Driving too fast down the fork in the road called Wrong.
How can we learn
When we are handcuffed to desks
And force-fed hope and math and science and dreams.
I will have to straighten up one day
And become one too:
A believer in the Future and a crusader against the Present.
The girl who let the glass crush beneath her feet,
And who bled through the white socks called Childhood,
Until there was nothing left but obsidian blackness
Where a person should be.
I don’t remain.