Too good, too sober too clean

The grey hairs in my amateur beard

Have finally outnumbered the black

It looks a complete mess

Not one thing or the

Other (I will shave it off tonight)

But thank god for these aches and pains

And lack of remaining melanin

Thank the deviant pagan gods

For 48 hour hangovers

For stigmatism and a delicate stomach

Because I look around me now

At the young people

Of which I am no longer one

And this I only recently acknowledged with any grace

They are turned on not

In the traditional sense

Tuned in not

In the classical manner

And my god do they all lack character

What has happened to our last hope  

When they all know

Exactly what line to follow

What job to get

How to get it

Exactly their direction home

What to wear how to eat

Who not to fuck

Adorned in the correct clothes

As though they fell out of their mothers like that

Blinkers on to any dangerous asides

Jesus

How do you ever reach functioning adulthood

Without first joyfully running the gauntlet

Of a semi-professional degenerate?

Alternatives

Cutting through a bagel, I recalled the girl stood next to me

At the checkout earlier that day and slipped with the knife

Straight down rather than a slice

A solid full-blade thunk into the palm of my hand

The metal didn’t hurt but embedded its smooth edge

Deep into the flesh stopping on the bone

She had purple eye shadow that intentionally matched

Her purple leather satchel bag

I found this for some reason unsettling

Even more so than her sideways resemblance to Isabella Rossellini

I stare at people too long, I thought. But what else is there to do?

I leaned my weight on the handle seeing how far I could get the knife

Until the pain started, but it went all the way through

I was just stood there dripping blood - half a hand on the counter

As people came in to make their grey coffee and dead sandwiches

They didn’t seem to notice. Or if they did

Nobody said a god damn thing about it to

Me.