PITY ME NOT: An Elegy Of Youth

Photo by Neil Yu

This is to us, who still go with the flow,
Who roll with the tide that surges downhill
Taking these paths of the least resistance —
While the greatest resistances dwell in us still.

So spurred to rhetoric — faulty, illogic,
Perpetually adolescent, petrified to fail,
This reminder’s for you, and is for me, too:
You’ve already heard — education isn’t for sale.

But as paths to the future lie obscure and unlit,
Illumination is pricey if you believe you should buy it.
To receive than to take it, remake as you see fit,
To mindlessly consume than to actively create it.

Confident and clueless, glad to be given a chance,
Blatantly lied to our faces, and led straight to the dance;
From the crack of the slate to the end of the tape,
From the womb to the tomb, we passively take shape.

In a trance, kept at bay, with our focus astray,
Incoherent, half-truths bring us right into the fray.
Striving for highlights, our struggle’s unreal,
And shredded integrity was never part of the deal;

We spin as broken records, these mixed signals beckon;
Our one civic duty is to learn how to reckon
And to forge a brash practice in utter-bloody truth —
But where is the spark in such half-hearted youth?

Talented voices sing with the same old songs,
And star-bright minds dull with the same old wrongs;
Hands, wills, hearts conceive of gods that fail,
Our pre-fabricated destinies issued wholesale;

Condemned to silence while these fraying ties rot —
Forgive, forget, take over — but pity us not!
We sleepwalk through time — soon shall our dawn break!
My dear fellow traveler, do you finally wake?

To whatever we believed the shining future to be,
To whoever would herald us into redemption —
Oh, but to be fated for such a crowning humanity,
And oh, to be worthy of that misconception!