Memory Sketch of Adolescence Part One
Expectations of a life to live
Blow jobs in back alleys
An elfin girl lost to a car wreck
A father to believe in
A cigarette stolen from an auntie’s purse
Ambitions to be realised
Bad advice from a counsellor
A career in the army
The bad corner of a lane
A secret kiss under cotton covers
Ambitions yet to appear
Warm your hands in mine
The sister without morals
A skipping rope discarded
Tolkien passes through the dark
Thoughts of suicide on Mondays
Explore religions for answers
No answer ever comes
A brother lost to a labyrinth
Never knowing of a wasted life
Think it’s cool to be a Buddhist
Local gangster with a snide remark
Big man of the town
Only followed and admired by clowns
A hero and a homecoming
Someone’s mother and her tears
An old man smoking rollies through a grin
A lost boy and his fears
Doing brilliant in English
Eyes as black as regret
The Catcher in the Rye
Following a sparrow’s flight path
News of a local murder
The way she sang in church could cure the sick
An embarrassment at a party
Unknowing of the life to come
Chris Co
Wed 9th Mar 2011 16:59
A simple enough premise- the list.
But poetically it works really well when intelligence is applied.
You do not appear to present any judgement, simply listing and juxtaposing the various themes and vagaries that can leap to the fore through a would-be or actual adolescence.
But the final line offers up some strange notions/feelings related to how our present becomes our past.
What is to come cannot be listed of course.
And this to me at least brings a feeling of contrast to all that has gone before.
How silly it seems with the benefit of hindsight that the trivial takes its place next to the significant. The sacred alongside the fluff of life.
Is this just profane?
No of course not.
This is of course how life is lived- literally in time.
With hindsight people often edit out this nature of reality and paint life through tinted specs.
I like what you've done.
Chris