Suburban Kids with Nothing Better To Do
Suburban Kids with Nothing Better To Do
by Mylo Reyes
There always seems to be
an empty seat on the train,
when I stumble back home
wearing a backpack stuffed with
two nights of staying-with-the-parents.
There’s nothing to do
and the shopping sucks.
All of the suburban kids
I crashed lockers with,
only ever bought the feeling of second place.
Caught between shut eyes and alarm clocks,
we daydream in circles and basements,
as fuck up kids and fucked up kids.
Wrists could be cutting boards
and our heads Perinola tops.
Legacy schoolboys and bulimic sweethearts,
self-medicating luckless attitudes
with drugs and liquor,
handed to us from side seats
and questionable salesmen.
We are suburban kids
with nothing better to do.
We grew up on Gatsby
and the white picket fence
and lawns that look like
Vivien Leigh kissed them.
Though, grandmother
never told us what
a Rolls Royce meant
nor how we’d close the deal.
We found the upsides,
in dusty record players
and cramped garages,
filled them with thick smoke
and drove to nowhere
looking to upset the neighbors
or find something stupid to laugh about.
All while marking our calendars;
the strikes waiting for the day
we can pick our fight with the world.
We would confide in The Hubble
and passerby comets, shouting
“Suburbia, I would
stand a little straighter,
without you on my shoulders.
I won’t sink. Not here.”
Though, now, when I visit,
I’m not sure where I’m sinking.
I just know I hold flooded lungs
and lost the arms I used to use
to reach for the stars.
We want the big city dream,
not the anxiety or the self-fulfilled inadequacies,
suicidal musings and contemplations,
your university friends poke fun at,
while you think about loading a gun
or swallowing pills
as they drool.
I think, maybe, we’ll find our names,
between Bigfoot and Lochness.
We’re not sad, we just get tired.
And maybe Arrested Development
might make us feel just a bit better.
We know we’re all a mess,
and I’m fine with that, for now,
‘cause we won’t let anybody
take from us, the hope
that someday we won’t be.
{my response poem}
Permission
(relieved of responsibility)
If only “no” meant “I’m scared you will do it because I can’t stop you and I can’t afford to solve the problems caused by trying”.
If only “no” meant “do it anyway but do it in secret, sweetened from an artificial shame~ so you could share the invention of it like an inside joke to make your shameless friends blush.”
If only “no” meant “I care about your safety because I will need you able-bodied and alive for when my life begins to unravel so you can expend the excess saved holding me together”.
If only “no” meant “My experience has told me that what you mean to do will harm you in a way that once harmed me and I really want to save you from becoming that much more like me unimproved”.
But no. “No” from you is a reflex echo bounced off crumbling fears you never questioned yourself. So rather than lend audience to this crippling ghost of “no”, waste my inheritance begging why, I will misunderstand your faults on purpose and do what I want without question. (I fear anything less will leave me nothing else to lose.)
I didn’t expect the ending of this. Throughout it’s so world-weary and dismal for suburbia and their lives weighing down on their shoulders. All the finely executed details make the outlook appear hopeless. I don’t know where the hope comes from, other than the innate buoyancy of youth. But the oppression seems so ingrained, it doesn’t seem capable of holding out for its deliverance.