Young Poets

[heslopian]

Sex and death are what occupy us.
Our sadness is the sadness of the young.
We do not think with bitterness.
Bitterness is accrued like experience.
(Maybe they are one and the same.)
What we have is straightforward anger.
Melancholia like a disease.
A rash with no root staining the flesh.
The skin pillow our mother's pinched.
I'm not a poet because I'm depressed.
Nor am I depressed because I write verse.
Life is a series of coincidences.
Many among us will abandon our pens.
Transcend the arrogance of youth.
(It was only a way of filling the time.)
Others will balance talent and content.
Work and write and die in happiness.
Maybe achieve that bitter quality.
Earn the right to be world weary.
A few will never escape the sadness.
Like those who stay thirteen forever.
Now and again they'll still produce.
Subsisting on a routine of medication.
Until they leave as delayed suicides.
I hope I'll belong to the second section.
But I would make do with the first.

I fear that I am destined for the third.
[youtube]z961ufVrBOc[/youtube]

[rowens]

I read somewhere that anyone that's creating anything, writing, painting, is doing it to literally get out of Hell. You look at that as an educated adult and that's simply not true. But in the saying of it, you can feel that it might become true. And there's a difference between being utterly heartbroken and severely depressed. I think you know what I mean. Your girl Sylvia didn't put her head in an oven because she was a sad young woman, but because she couldn't feel anything but that constant overwhelming gnawing of something urgently on its way but that she knew would never come again. Depressed young people might appear like typical angst, but they're cursed to know that about themselves, and don't have quite the same release as others when it comes to youthful rebellion and cynicism, they see things more harshly, and experience things more intensely since things are now compared to the voids that they've known. But no need to get mired by neurotic doubt or shame. Keep yourself out of Hell! By any means necessary. And if you have to go there, make an adventure of it, keep the poet alive, because anyone that can make form out of a void is useful here. Let that motivate you if it ever comes back to a time when nothing else can. There's always a need for someone to show how it can be done. Let yourself be bored or your soul splayed in all agonizing directions for decades if it comes to it, as long as each time death offers you the knife you can say, in any style of voice at all, "If you want me you're going to have to take me!" you've proved you're still worthy of being a voice in this world.

[billy]

christ jack, i was happy when i woke up this a.m.

i wish i'd belonged to the first
i do thing sylvia was a drunk who suffered from depression to such an extent she couldn't take any more... i'm not sure it had anything to do with poetry or if poetry helped her get to the oven any quicker. she'd certainly got past the young poet stage....after a few reads i honestly say it's a tight write.

[heslopian]

To be honest I find this poem a bit sentimental and embarrassing in retrospect Nowadays I'm (slightly) less romantic and would agree with you about Sylvia.

[billy]

some poems are more or less beyond chronology. (timeless )
i think this one would be a truism for most periods.

[heslopian]

Thanks for the kind feedback, Thunder

[Aish]

"Delayed suicides". Lyrically and physically this combination strikes hard.

This is a little maudlin, Jack, but I do find it quite relevant.

[heslopian]

Thanks for the feedback, Aish Maudlin is my speciality

[Mr. Brown]

Wow, that was powerful stuff.. I really love this poem, it engrosses the reader and really puts the mind in motion, im questioning what section I may fall, fantastic write. These are the types of words that could one day change the way many think