Youth!
But then so serious: so wicked dead-on lifeless, hostile.
Creeps we beat on in the school-yard (impossible to just ignore) now rule the world and they are MURDERERS beyond the pale, beyond imagining, beyond whatever adolescent cruelties, spiked with erotic longing, hot mocking desire — for the girl next door? — we set loose upon their pimply heads.
I mean, this is serious, this misery unleashed upon the world (incubated, we admit, within the green, florescent acres of the school yard).
Serious beyond all Innocence and Experience and piper pipe your something-something from that poem by Blake.
When we were sixteen, reading the world, alive to better than, better than, better than we’d known.
Possibilities of better magic now (then) and to come. Clean spine stacked-link chains of shopping mall bookstores, unlimited potential to consume… knowledge — was that what it was? Another consumer scam? Get it all in get it all now before it’s too late and you MISS EVERYTHING…
Again the story of the family affair, adult situations, but the kids know all they know, all that parental supervision advised was not mandatory — can they make it mandatory?
“Pharaoh said we could!”
(stay up late cook Jiffy pop; watch monster flicks — The Mummy, Return of the Mummy, Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein, Dracula the Wolfman and J. Edgar Hoover )
“Pharaoh said we could Pharaoh said” they can do anything because we’ll let them paint pretty scenes of timeless dream-scape, or words of “empowerment” in black-and-white.
Free to vote, protest, speak your mind, run circles round the block…under supervision of the nones.
The fattest none of all, Sister Chrone, lost in the folds of our bad habit (black and white in timeless word-scape). Sister Chrone, celebrity man-killer. Sister Chrone, the none away forever– vanished, poof! — into our black-and-white labia, left us sin.
And sin we had, within the confines of “normality” or “humanity” or whatever you choose to name our boundaries, limitations, walls.
But still…
This is not poetic justice (for what? head-locks, bruises, “wedgies?”), this is MURDER.
Could even Pharaoh — or his lawyer — get us out of this unscathed, unpunished, or at the very least, forgiven?