Escape!

We try to escape our youth nightly. Cigarettes and old movies. Things our parents can’t appreciate. Things their parents liked. The cycle is a gross machine. Samsara. 

Time makes us love our Grandparents more than they deserve and hate our parents more than they deserve. We do this back and forth every twenty years, vote and kill accordingly, and see what the fuck happens. “… and thus they found out.”

It’s 4/20, and of course, I know it’s Hitler’s birthday and something about potheads. Two fairly shitty shooters rack up a wild amount of kills as they cruise the halls of Columbine Highschool at a gentle clip. Door to door, floor to floor. This is when the concept of youth died. When Adolescence itself committed suicide in front of hallway cameras and the whole damn world. 

The grown-ups start to fear the youth. The old turn on the young. Hamster dance cannibal holocaust. Saturnine diner’s cards. Yellow brick roads lined with crucifixes and crows.

If I make eye contact with a teacher for too long, they turn their head away. 

It’s almost midnight and I roll the window down on my shitbox car and push it down the street. When I’m far enough away from the house for comfort, I jump in and start it up. I drive along the lake and out the back to the diner at the corner. In the winter, this route is beautiful. Moo,n glass glowing lakes. Silver and blue and black and gray. In fall, the air is chilled and great for rolling the windows down to smoke. The dead leaves smell like renewal. They crunch under my slow rolling tires like driving over sheets of crisp pastry. 

I love the smell of coffee. I love the smell of diner food and the sound of silverware on plates. The light pats of the tummy. The laughs and cries. I love that in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, there is a bright light and under it, I can smoke cigarettes, write my poems, and worry about the future.