Clean: An Anthology

Melancholia of the Verse

melancholy is simple to process.
there is a formula for it, and we are the experts.
lowercase letters and hospital metaphors
lose yourself in teenage softness and crimson dreams.
poetry is not from the heart, but from the mind:
keep it short, keep it simple, oft-repeated themes
of losing something or someone in the shadows.

and those who dare to ask about anything else?
remember they are only denying your truths.
but is this the culture, the world we were promised?
a world where anything resembling complexity,
anger and shame and the desire to forget who you are
for one solitary minute are too much to handle
in the bestseller pastel anthologies?

it is not my duty to deny the beauty of sadness,
merely to offer a critical eye to it's takeover of the verse.
be, we are capable of being so much greater than this:
this world of sharply, identically bladed razors
mass-produced to slash the hearts of teen outcasts.
all I want is the ability to ask, to hope, to think and to cry-
and to use my words to slide through the emotional spectrum
instead of waiting patiently at the end.