Leaking Despair by Liam Whan

An icy blue horizon
A cold steel future,
But still I’m looking back,
At The same shit the generation before had to hack

You know, I came of age here
I mutated from ignorant to sage here
My body wracked with seizures
Fighting the beast within
Who was fighting to stay alive
As I took a historically unusual nose dive

In to the mud
Of our prejudice
My neck as red as blood
My eyes squinted:

Who’s going to take what’s mine?
Which one of them holds the glass, in which I want to hold my wine?
Who can I blame?
Where can I aim?
This rifle
Fully loaded
With bullets of shame?

I remember being made a fool
By those who crowned themselves, “cool”
And the mornings I threw up
In silence, and fear
Because I didn’t want to go to school.
Because I couldn’t stand the veneer
Anger, hatred,
Sprinkled in laughter.
In years,
Spent trying to repair
The holes in our confidence
Leaking despair.

And still sometimes, as I’m driving along
I feel out of place, uncomfortable, wrong.
I feel detatched from this world,
And I don’t know why
Sometimes I just pull over,
Put my head to the wheel
And cry

And I can’t put my finger on a reason
Or memory
Just this feeling that my life is getting away
That I’m playing Russian roulette, with my youth
And my sanity’s at stake.

And sometimes I wish I never came of age
And people who think it’s a gift to be sage
Ought to think again
Ought not to think again.
Or else suffer this perpetual spin
Of mind.
Frantically grabbing on to protruding rocks of coherence
Or anything else I can find.

This country is great
But then, its just a country
It’s just sand, grass and golden soil
And the hardest workers I know
Have no wealth for their toil.

And every young man in it is playing with matches
Scabbing at picks and itching their scratches.

We are a wandering about in the wilderness
Desperately searching for our faces
We have been led here in succession
But no one saved us a place

We are all pieces,
But the puzzle is missing.

I am our conscience, our fragility.
And I am watching every young man
Fill the gaps in his worth with whiskey.

This decadence goes unheralded

Because as the rest of the world is free to scream,
To sear, to mope
Young men are routinely instructed to “cope”
Cause people like me, who have decided to call the bluff
Get told to stop moaning, “Sit down, enough!”

And I do,
Because I’ve got better things to do in my life than to just “get through”
Like finding worth
On those icy-blue horizons.