My Manifesto is a Working Title

very very very much in-progress. I love Sylvia Plath. And this is the most honest thing I've written in ages.

The middle-class white girl’s agonies include eating, filling teenage time

lone of our alloted love, and in the extremities of skin,

lips tinted and torn with frustration.                 

It’s such an absurd system of pleasantries we circulate through,

with our parents & retarded-down in our age group

We are flowering into society and boundless with charms,

with what grace in little vice.

 

There is an agony in anyone smiling more than we.

the proximity of a boy �" excruciating. 

the will to create a history from a birthtown bedroom never dies

So we wander, favoring night, swaying shadows on thin knees

pass through the pavement, silent turrets through gray-track tires and concrete

while trafficking gray wind beats into pink pores.

 

An agony in the insufferable uncouth & unhip churns of arbitrary noise

Passionate noise runs our clockwork… some punk avant-garde, metalopoly,

alt-tuned Internet radio straight from Scandanavia.

Music with the same slobbering metaphors and sawing guitars

an electric cello hollowed out in celestial squeal. It lifts me away.

And we are all destined, already trapped

in radio-oven hiss, dinging pots & pans.

 

I live each mirror-plated day

for the delight in red lips painted in impossible sheen

& the agony in trapped sharp-thistled eyes beneath.

We stare at the moon, and we know everything.

Our identities stretch the world over.

 

Trailing flannel tatters and chains, costumed up a dangerous princess

We play in lines of ink & glitter

yarn-hearts torn from our love-rot notebooks,

opened with crackling pasted tears.

We wait from safe boxed houses,

staring black windowpanes hanging in the wilderness

with revolving eyes enraptured in agony beneath.

 

Reviews

[Naomi Montana Walsh]

This is ..great honestly..there are some spelling errors ..but that is not a fault in content or does it make this poem any less great.. this is real..and show me an ID.. because I rarely see a teen so self aware and observant of what is happening..
an absurd system of pleasantries circulated through

our parents & retarded-down in our age group

that is wise beyond your years.. I work in a High School so , I have many conversations with poeple your age and I always think I must of been an idiot when I was younger as they all seem smarter than I was..but now I read this and look back at my old poetry..which was benign at best and I think..this here is a talented writer already..what took me so long.. to be able to write.. ?

[Emily B]

I find nothing ridiculous about it. I find the work completely charming. Honesty is usually. . .