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Poem: Photographic Autobiography

Sometimes I feel like Shawn Mullins singing "Rockabye"; a soulless white boy talking knowingly over a cheap R and B beat.

Photographic Autobiography

I am the hopeless slacker romantic who would love to bring you roses...
but you'll have to settle for dandelions.
I believe that the great mixed tape
brings two people together over great distances
much more than anything else ever, ever could.
Giving me space is the surest way of getting me home
and for all of my selfish wandering and self-absorbed roaring
really, all I want is to be held.
Not quite a lion, no longer a lamb,
since when did cats have wool?
I'm a forceful and ambitious kid
who can't really make up his mind.
Who are you raging against?
Why do you run?
Sometimes the questions you ask are much more delicious
than the answers you seek.

I am a child of the grunge era.
Dirty guitars and messy lyrics mean everything to me
even if that little Pandora's Box
has already been emptied.
Optimism is dead, but dreaming isn't
and somewhere on this hopeless earth
we all carry the hopes
of our own secret utopias.
Long hair and ripped jeans,
peeling fingernails and patchouli stink
I would like to be an outward reflection
of the world's corporate-covered ugliness.
But in the eyes of Cobain
there's that little bit of truth that says
I can laugh with the best of 'em
and maybe life isn't so bad after all.
Besides, patchouli smells really good.

So
there you go
and here I am.
Perched on the razor-thin wire
of my silvery little ego
on top of the mile-high declaration
of all my activist's ideas.
It's a precarious perch,
but tasty all the same.
There ain't no net
but I've got pretty strong bones
inherited from the jungle
and the desert
and rusted red fur
and black feathers
and my really, really strict
Jehovah's Witness of a mother.
I can fall...
but I'll get up again.
And that, I believe,
is exactly what you make of it.