A zillionaire’s daughter allegedly dyed her hair blue, and twenty years later she told the rest of us, because surely we could relate. And okay, we all had a punk phase, or at least, we all painted our nails black or blue or neon once or twice as we all burned a hundred CDs and scratched incantations across the front in sharpie, then flung them at our friends, a thousand messages all in the same bottle. We all decided we were witches, and a lot of us were right. We’ve all haunted Goodwills and Salvation Army stores, searching for some material: For a shirt that screams: notice me harder now, and fingers-crossed it doesn’t cost more than the five in our pockets. We’ve all drowned our confused, inexpressible fury at the way the people/places/things that are supposed to help, from real assistance to so-and-so’s pet charity, seem intent on tripping up the people we love and punishing them for falling into frustration as graceless as the anarchy signs scratched into desks and bus-seats and denim, and skin. We’ve all done our time dyeing our hair badly and regretting our roots; cutting study hall, lurking on stoops, giggly on boxed wine. Ink in our teeth, the blood just a few generations beneath our fingernails. A lot of us followed that band around the country once or thrice, whether they deserved it or not, and most of us still aren’t sorry for it. Some of us read the Beats, and took too many years to see see how little space for us there was between their lines. A lot of us smoke, or quit. We've all talked about sell-outs and a lot of us have lived to regret it. Some of us have jobs now. Some of us are getting married, some of us don’t care about the parts that came before anymore and some of us care too much. We all either had the anger starting out and looked until we found a place to put it, or found the frame first, liked it, and constructed some fury to keep inside it. We’ve all been the only one dancing on a half-dead Tuesday in a hardcore bar. Is that the kind of punk phase you meant, Ivanka?

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.