Twenty-One

A poem I wrote a while -- yet not so long -- ago.

At twenty-one
I am too old and too young,
too bold, and too easily undone.
More than ever,
I am
the onion I always thought people could be;
layers
years
sixteen hundred skins
all enclosed in one.
Skin encircled by skin,
cell snug with cell
sweetness at the very core.
Right now,
I am too green,
my vision too pink
my heart too warm.
I know not of the world,
they tell me.
For in the real world,
glistening doorknobs tarnish
with every clockwise turn,
lacquered wood loses its varnish
with each dancer's swoosh and whirl.
There is no magic
in the real world.
In the real world
the dark hearts of cities
burn
in fires lit by poor men
to stay warm.
Paper, wet wood, tyres,
and the souls of passersby
well-traversed but long gone,
into smoke.
The man says:
What's his is mine,
what's yours is, too,
what's mine is mine,
the masses are just mules.

---

And yet
the sun rises and sets
each day,
storms come,
tides turn.
Flowers ripen into fruit
friends find their way into my heart
leaves find their way through the fall.
And the ceaseless turning of the world
never fails to astound me;
the fact that we continue to exist
on this giant misshapen sphere
that spins madly
on an axis of our imagination,
or how the sun draws out all the colours in the sky
as it runs to rest, vivified,
calling out,
clinging on to the warmth of its embers
overwhelms me.
At twenty-one,
I am too young to see everything,
too clouded by preconception to see it clearly, for sure.
Too weathered to see the joy that cold mountain air brings in the autumn,
only how brisk it is in my bones.
Because
words are wood pulp
life is wandering prose,
people are just empty vessels
and you know what they say about those.

November, 2012