Distortion channeled the anger,
Annihilation of soul commenced
Through filters of noise.
Industrial trash to feed the homeless,
Prozac to pacify the rebellious,
Books and music plagiarized by formulas,
Whistles of distraction fired from prime-time
Hernias of Friends and Seinfeld.
Postmodernism debunked by computers,
Networks, medications, reality TV,
The paralyzing venom of advertising
Packaging the hopes of youth,
Auctioning them off to the machine.
And the kids they grew up,
The kids hurdled the valley of death,
Streetlight prayers drowned by freeways,
And yet they dreamed, the kids growing up,
How fragile they were, abused by the system,
Parents who forgot how to read,
Forgot history, forgot their kids
Wasting away in basements of neglect.
On drugs and gunshots the kids grew up,
Losing their religion, their teenage spirit,
Crucified brains stained on Jeremy's blackboard,
Cold nights in bonfire under the bridge downtown.
And I grew up too, perched over the wasteland,
Ejected from history, golden ages of community,
Buried by darkness of awkward identity,
Self-esteem mutinied, self-respect bullied,
To contemplate the big idea from the sideline,
To summon the will to survive.
Neglection was my shield, desperation my sword,
Embers of rage the nuclear meltdown besieged,
Holocaust built on scraps of demolition
Yearning for a stability once captured
So blissfully by the Sonics and Mariners.
Grunge was my anthem, like the kids who grew up,
The raped kids, the mechanical brood
Picked from an assembly line to reap the cartridge.
And it was there, in a reverse suburbia,
Where the automated apocalypse throttled
The surface, earthquakes broke the structure,
Whose horror novels became reality,
The system broke down, subverted by nature,
Gothic aperture dilating a social suicide.
Magnetron vortex that gravitated the damage,
Innocence consumed by anarchy, war,
Freaks unleashed by the millennial gateway
Opened by aliens on the radio waves
Spewing litany of conspiracies across the high desert,
Trapping us lost souls, we children of the Korn.
Bitterness burned me, I lifted the axe,
Cut the cord on my youth, drowned in the past,
My little boy, yes my lovely little boy,
Struggled to keep up, to keep his stupid head
Above water, above the clouds, above the violence,
My beautiful little boy turned ugly by ninth year,
A crying angel, skin fried, feathers snipped,
Ripped carcas off the mist, a warm place,
A place I didn't belong, I didn't belong there
On that aimless path, that torture chamber of desks,
Knowing everybody's name, nobody knowing mine,
The hours becoming days, the days becoming months,
The months stealing the years,
Boxing them with ribbons of deceit,
I didn't belong there, I belonged to that apocalypse
The 90s promised, because there was no other
Way out, nothing to inspire change
But the caterpillar in Lector's metaphor,
That became a butterfly to escape the burning.
Prescription low, electric storm brewing,
Zapping that little boy, torturing him,
Burying him in the subconscious
Never to return, never to follow me,
The young man I was meant to become,
Locked in the crystals of an ice-cold cavern.
One morning I woke up.
I got out of bed and brushed my hair.
In the mirror I saw that little boy.
My face was his.
His face was the transformation.
I tied him to my shadow.
I brought him with me.
Down the street we walked
Thinking about a girl.
And that's when I wanted her.
That's when I wanted to become her.
I wanted to bring the past with me
By becoming her.
The only way to become her
Was to love her.
Then to lose her.
Then to live again.
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