The Kids All Look a Million

Men in white coats have been performing
alterations on our genes and on our seed stock
for many years now. As you might have
noticed, successive generations have ceased
to breed true. Offspring these days are
no longer immune to anything, despite
the carving out of armored faces they grow up
and do. Kids all look a hundred years older
for every five they manage just to keep
themselves alive. With these same eyes I stil
l have stuck in my head I have seen it and
a hundred thousand others can attest to it too:
the plants brought up from hybrid seeds
are only as strong as the soil they're grown in--
they frequently die as young as heirlooms.
The truth is that I have been half-living
all these years on the same deceitful morsels
everyone half-lives on and pretends to love.
I have been standing by just out of reach
watching children eat whatever they are given,
whatever comes out of the cans, bottles
and baggies they find at the store. Most of us
do in fact survive for some time on unsayable
names alone, on unsaid unknowns. But
who around here isn't more callous now?
Who doesn't need all the help they can get
remembering to breathe and exactly how to
care? I am just a child of baggies and concrete
ghost towns and I am cold, am thankless, am
pretending to live. Aren't we really children's
children to begin with? We run a serious risk
of vagrancy right from the start, and are not
immune. We foster brats strike out over
the highway, menacing speedstars underneath
the bridge. We steal onto turnpikes, pretend
we can get where we're going by foot.
We walk, as if they let us live, with thumbs
stuck out looking for a home. We pretend
we thrive but are scarcely spindly seedlings yet.
We strain to sink some roots down into
the black-top which cannot sustain us. We
don't thrive. We thirst, are cold, are thankless.
We scratch out circles in pavement in search of
a home. We walk in circles just to be certain we
don't get somewhere. Who walks to really get
somewhere these days? Who knows the way by
foot? Who reads the directions? Who reads?
Who lives in the presence of light? Sometimes
I live just by my night shoes, my old tunes, my
desperate blows. "I remember when," I sing
to myself in the dark. I remember when.
Remember? The days have meant everything.
Remember them all? An hour these days might
as well be forever. Children are born with
ancient faces. They have endings forced down
their throats from the moment they awake.
They lick those pills slowly as other kids
used to lick sweets. And they are not immune.
They stand to live and can't even tell they're
pretending. Their roots scurry around behind
them pining for soil. They pass years, have
years of days to remember that add up to
nothing and they all look a million years old.
They stand. They pace and breathe. They try
not to walk in circles forever, but their children
too, in turn, will only walk to walk up and down
the strip. They will not read. They will be high
by the highway, floored by the menacing speed of it all,
and never again immune to the passing of all
these stars underneath the bridge.

(1994)