Crayons With Cloth

Perforated curlicues in waxy gold against the birch

Decorate its laminated antiseptic glory

As tiny arms make calculated loop de loops in graceful swinging carelessness

That covers the table in victory marks of peaceful anarchism

If just by freeing some personality in the face of rigid pessimism

By marking a standardized surface with individualism.

***

Adolescent muscles sore as eyebrows struggle to convey

The emerging depth of young emotion

Behind canvases of cleanliness with saddened blank expressions

Submitting to the hastily defined authority

That saves the sorest trials for its own posterity

Manipulating into silence those just learning how to speak.

***

Carbon dioxide passes through with slight demands of force

That occupy the edges of awareness

Inhaling moisture in the warmth of gaslit burdensome

Discomfort on the faces of the future generation

That funnels wordlessly into repeated deprivation

Of the freedom to experience a range of full sensation.

***

The smallest steps are necessary for the safety of the group

The smallest bodies needed

When bigger ones are going off the rails falling on the sword

Someone has to bend to rules to snap them into place

Succumbing to demands that no one else can seem to face,

So we send our purest mice through the experimental rat race.

***

Now crayons with cloth are predictable parts of the public paradigm

Sticking to the rules like a leech

While rule enforcers celebrate their overriding influence

With selfish optimism that they’ve found the strategy

To separate themselves from any agony

That's needed to collectively avoid a malady

By leaving it with whom you're not supposed to leave

So little ones can carry burdens of society

Complying with the orders that unjustifiably

Take advantage of their beautiful naivety

So adults can find repose to calm their own anxiety

While kids are left to scribble yellow wax dejectedly.