Posted a new video blog on my Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/bazmcstay - which includes this poem below. You’ll notice the better quality. Visual and audio, not poetic quality. Thankfully, with my 24th birthday having recently passed on May 25th, I was able to invest in a brand spanking new Sony Handicam. My natural technophobia saw me hovering at the window of the shop for a good ten minutes before I plucked up the courage to take the plunge and buy it. It’s a great purchase however – from my point of view anyway, though you may protest at having further vloggery inflicted upon you. Shout out to Stephen Byrne (http://www.youtube.com/user/3sixty5days), who got me into this vlog business, and a major cyber-hug for him and his fellow-Leaving Cert victims who all had their English Paper 2 postponed from Thursday until Saturday, thanks to someone in a school in Drogheda handing out that instead of Paper 1 this morning. Maybe Bob Quick has found a new job - he’s that police chief from Britain who was snapped on camera carrying those confidential files into Number 10. Try having a go at being a dustman, Bob, you’ll find no one is interested in what you’re carrying around in that job!
Anyway, final exam approacheth on Friday. Wish me luck and hope you like the poem.
The Teenager
Surviving on one triangular meal a day
and the stress-free strains of candy-floss music,
the angry teenager is all lazy eyes,
a floating head trailing his neck behind him.
He’s nothing but wrong angles and skinny bones
and proceeding hairlines betray growing cracks
and it always pains him to say anything
but especially anything loud and clear.
Fuck knows, he’ll swear at anything but to nothing
and let you no farther than pockmarked-skin-deep.
He hides in a hoodie in a corner,
looks for a bolt-hole in his Nokia
and duck-dives beneath the waves of the iPod
but each eye that grazes him draws young blood,
sketching out in bright red lines like tube maps
the veins and arteries of a beating life.
He wears a faceful of macho make-up
but pens pretty poetry in the dark
in between wet dreams and dry, droughty spells.
He keeps the water-taps shut tight in public
but draws from the well and spills many a bucket
when the drop of a ball is the end of the world.
He can’t get away from huggy mummy and daddy
and he hates them for it, but when he cuts loose
he drops crumbs of homemade scones as he goes,
sprays his eyes over the forest floor for raisons.
He’ll do plenty of ageing during those teens –
like the name suggests, he’s always on the move –
and the pressure is there right from the word grow:
the world pushes in on his skull like a finger
pressing into marshmallow, puffs back out,
full of sugary notions and impressions.
He never fails to bounce back, rubber ball,
spring-loaded, always ill but best equipped,
never hitting bottom but always falling.
