Don’t talk to me about the carrot-and-stick.
Here’s your average kid: six years old and bright eyed
watching bonfire cinders roll in the night time.
Amongst family, camping - stamping poles in resilient earth,
learning what love, coming from nothing you’re giving, is worth.
It was unconditional. Overt.
An immigrant for a father found it difficult to work,
rather, he diligently served for minimal earnings
but when life’s simple you know little of the fiscal burden.
Fuck does that matter when a literal word and
a hug is all you need to lift your person?
His pops pulls him closer, one sip from sober,
in between the thoughtful love that’s shown
(mired with wafts of godawful rubbed cologne)
he insists, when grown, surely the kid will know.
In lamenting notes: “Getcha education.” -- the scent still holds.
Call it hard power, dangle it off a cliff.
He’s fifteen, and smart.
This is where big dreaming starts
except he feels apart there. School’s easy,
at least academically, not needing hard work.
But he’ll pass an enemy with needling, harsh words
every time he shuffles in the courtyard’s dirt.
Rebuttals with curled palms hurt.
It’s the mental that carves worse than the somatic.
He’s learning the system’s meant to be meritocratic
yet merit’s indistinct. Helps when you’ve the pennies to have shit.
Not shoes handed down to a third son, as with the rest of your fabrics,
by the man proud of you, despite his wrestling habit to tie the noose
around your juvenile neck and beg you to practise jumping
in the pursuit of success. That is something ambivalent.
A hulking, vast silhouette shading all progress.
Make it a contest. Fail to surpass a father
who’ll barely have the nails for a coffin.
Pertaining to sovereign.
He’s twenty-two.
Managed to numb his improbable aspirations.
It’s psychological castration,
with ashtrays unfurling lines of nominal, apt grey
shaping malaise for a self-medicating prodigal, mad patient.
The wallet in his hand’s vacant. Thinking on halcyon days
with a dad passed. Since, months have been jaded.
“Fatrats on the backs of fatcats commissioning labrats
in hazmats to perform further on labrats.” - he hates it.
Can’t be a part of this.
Marxist-ish with a karmic twist is, in a word, considerate.
“The bourgeois exploit the proletariats for their indifference.”
Questions posed among his own thoughts amount to naught.
Broken walks on frozen shores to refresh his oldest haunts.
Can’t really hear anyone parroting about carrots and stick,
his whole life’s had him feeling like the garrotte’s been rigged.
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