Jesus was a beat poet Elizabeth Hollinger In an ideal world the end of the line is somewhere near the start So always when you go as low as you can you're also as high as possible. So I smoked pot a lot and kept my cool as cold as I could because that' ain't true, it's ideal. With an ideal world, there wouldn't even be a low. Maybe I should say in an ideal mind My mind isn't ideal. Everything else usedta be. I'm squeeky clean really, Never been had, never been bad Never forgotten to say thank you or please Ever since I was little and I'd ask my mom to reach a glass way up high And she'd ask "what do you say?". Thank you Unless I got the rehearsed answer wrong and said "Please". She'd give me the glass anyway as if any pleasantry was good enough. Then I'd get her to pour me water, and there'd be more thank yous in a little boy voice. "Doesn't fit the thirst" That’s my pleasantry of choice nowadaze, It suits the man's voice I've got now. I say it in a nice way, Because I know you're thinking it doesn't sound like a pleasantry at all. Ill fitting clothes on me Look like scant amounts of liquid in a ziploc bag with absolutely no air in there at all. And even though they're too big I'm just as suffocated as that liquid. Tied up boots and filled out pockets Swinging with more momentum than my legs so they smash around And when they stop I feel like I've died Like my own natural momentum isn't good enough to hurl me over the obstacles. And my hair's like paste, Thin and dry and full of dirt and oil and whatever else has rained down or been rubbed in. Sweat I guess Helps it stick to my forehead, which sizzle itches like the sting of peroxide Only much more gentle and increasingly irritating Instead of decreasingly irritating. I've seen the dead, never before now, The closest I'd been to death was when the pet gecko went kaput And I saw how floppy it's once rigid and lizardlike frame became. And my best friend crying as she poked at him With his serene lizard king smile. He was telling her "Hey, girl, my time with you is through, and the stay was fantastic [She treated him well], But senorita I need to do the cold-blooded prowl on the Mesa Verde plains of red sand". There was something beautiful about that death, And something beautiful about the way it made me feel. But I cried, And crying is beautiful But not that kind of beautiful Like the girl I saw in the train station last August who wasn't like anything I've seen before. She wasn't like the serene dead lizard, that's for sure. I took that idea of death with me in my noggin to my life abroad, It stayed for awhile, It’s still there, But its party has been crashed by a rowdy bunch of people who partied so hardy they gauged out their eyes and spilled blood into the punch. But no one's trampled the lizard, He’s still got that serene little smirk that wraps all the way around his head. You asked me once if I ever had a normal conversation, Like one that could have been plucked right out of my bedroom or basement, or my best friends backyard. About the weather, Casually, And not how the heat really felt like it was burning you alive. How it felt instead like you could cook an egg on the sidewalk. One person I could always have normal conversations with was the guy next to me. Whoever he might be. And so I'd be bored a lot and talk talk talk about things I learned in school and read in books. About how science grows on trees, And money wasn't that easy to make when I didn't know how to spend it, Just stuff, But it wasn't ever all that normal Because atmosphere means a lot more than what people give it credit for. The only people that care about atmosphere anymore Are the people who review restaurants for magazines. They wouldn't give the warry scene anything near five stars. But my best friend's backyard was fit for a king. And kings are normal, You know they are. You told me once that King's weren't regal at all, But that they ate well and they pissed in silver toilets. And the Sun King burned up all the air for everyone else. But we don't have a king We have a leader And he must be emotionally blind to lead us into walls like this. Ive got a pickaxe And I hack away at the concrete that only blind men can’t see. We’re all these big concrete wallbricks And there we are With some goal to get to the other side So we have to attack the wall and we end up killing our friends because we Chip away their bricks, But soon we’ll see through and we’ll win Or else not, I don’t know. I’m young, not old and there’s a future flying out in front of me like a red carpet. So society says. Or biology. Both actually. But being young and presented with higher likelihood for death means no future, And little past. I say send the old people in, they’ve lived already, More than me and my generation. If everything ends at once, id rather be old, because id already have lived. Like kabooey and everyone dies, I’d want to be 90-frickin-5 and over the hill. I’d rather die on the way down, At least then I could have stood at the top and shouted out across the world That I was sitting on top of it all and enjoying the view. I started trekking up the hill and my course was diverted And the path turned into ice and ravines and crevasses and all the fun stuff; I can see how people give up and just don’t want to see the top anymore. As if their only escape were into death. Sad as hell, But id believe it. You think you know everything when you’re old, Except that which you’ve decided can’t be known I guess. Yet they say its kids who know everything, Crazy and possessed and running up that hill much too fast for our feet. But we’d get there, We would. If we weren’t so weighed down by people coming down the hill saying the top wasn’t so great. They just don’t know what great is. If we could just barrel up the hill it’d be fine, But some people push and shove And they’re just as dumb as the ones coming down feeling disappointed. We all hafta get there for it to be truly magnificent. But we’re fighting against eachother Hoping that beating others out of the way will help us run faster So we can spend a longer time picnicking on the summit. So few people are that strong. It’s like one-on-one competitions until only one person’s left standing. He or she’s happy and the rest of us are cream of broccoli. Nobody likes the taste of that. If it were a team sport half the people would be happy. Maybe that’s what it is right now, we form teams by nature And fight the others. It’d be nice if everybody helped everybody like one big happy team tra la la tralee. But I carry a gun. The real problem is that we have no damn clue how to form teams, How to “fight” fairly. The coaches are bad, Blame the coaches. My guess is a lot of girls will make it to the top. I think they’ve got better coaches. Smaller crowds egging them around in screwy directions. But there’s problems there too, I just want a little more perfection.