Today’s Youth

“The status of today’s youth is derived from a confluence of factors:

recycled trends, market forces, and capitalist whims”—

I listen to my clever friend in the retro-chic café,

awaiting a black tea from a dude with a lip ring.

The teenagers are slumped in big chairs, like

waxworks before a glowing TV screen:

scenes from Narnia flash

under their lids, and the colossal lion talks to them

in their sleep.

The girl with livid white skin awakens

and raises her delicate arm, bone thin.

Her boyfriend recoils from his seat

whenever he hears customers, like us, come in.

The punks and the neo-goths embrace fervently

in the middle of the café;

Oscar, fourteen, wears eyeliner,

Chloe’s plaid skirt is hiked well above her jeans.

We look at them with circumspection,

and speak our intellectual mumbo jumbo

because it is easier to theorize about “youth”

than to remember what it was like to be them.

CRA 2/12/2008