Supercharged:

I'm in wherever I am,

sitting, grinning, stealing

a chance when I can, taking

what I need or what I can

find around me. You are

supercharged, exhaling sparks,

crystal iterated to the nth power,

searing the social landscape

like laughing flame god's breath.

I should know how this goes,

but I haven't been there before.

Chrome and iron are paper and rock;

one covers the other in idealized games,

while reality finds the stronger beating

time on the fragile covering, or

shielding it by supporting it from storms

outside. Society is a game you choose to play.

Your cat's cradles collapse into net-traps

of strings, and you need a scissors, a rude Alexander

to fend off the complexities which arise

when wishing to preserve every strand

of something ultimately useless. I have a sword.

I have hacked up my own life to bits, said "This

is a game and this is reality," gone where I needed to,

done what I had to. You are learning this

fitfully, a backsliding betwetter,

making trauma and asking others to clean it.

I have done enough of my own laundry

to see where the extra detergent is needed.

But I watch the same TV shows as you do

and see chrome elevated to art:

mirror of my researched desires, I see peaks

of physical perfection and sarcastic humor

or passionate declaration reached at hour

intervals. By people like you. And I see

you in the world, living this, and see what it

does to you, and still I think, "Isn't this how

life is supposed to be led? Isn't that what

I watch this thing for, anyway, to be shown

what I'm supposed to be doing?"

(I am, of course, young, and we rebels

are prone to such pack mentality.) Not for

escape; that is the province of those who couldn't

live this anyway, having lost their former pulse. See this:

I should bare my chest, move to New York,

club and fuck and shoot up and go down.

I know how it ends: crying in a room, cell or

hospital or bedroom, whatever, wherever.

The calling card of Too Much Fun.

But for a moment you apex, you combust,

you sky and circle and laugh and dance,

you do things I never would, go places

I've never been, be the pattern young person

of our generation. Pretty corpse optional.

Or maybe just the dead soul I hear on phones,

ranging over topics, variety in grooves,

drink and strip and regret. You can see only sixty

seconds into the future. Flashing and laughing,

you embrace these seconds and wonder why

regrets creep up later. Why not ask why before?

My regrets are contained in ignoring moments;

I shrink from them, fear and pass by hoping

to go unnoticed, figment of the corner

of everyone's eye. Your regrets are explosions

of bombs you armed yourself. The passionate

declaration of hate, the callous leavetaking,

the object hurled from across a room

that just misses your head. Meanwhile,

Am I so happy? I sit here, sometimes,

not crying but bleeding out of my eyes,

and I feel a need, a duty to myself to find

smoke and aspirates to swirl and trash

the air hanging in front of me like an

empty white box, to put the kindest

inscrutable gloss on what is the essential

emptiness of living in the world, for me.

I don't know where to find substance,

and I don't know whether to be sad.

You hurl yourself at the void

and I shy away from it, and we both

end up deader than souls should be, now.

At this age. Are these the alternatives

that we have been presented with, or is there

a third way? I can't tell, and you don't care.

So we will blunder on forward, separate, together,

seeking each other as refuge from the night.

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