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The Challenge: CJP-Teens: What do adults get wrong about teenagers?
Counting backwards is never fun,
especially when you're fifteen.
Ten friends who misplaced their true selves,
relentlessly searching the Lost and Found
which they find in the form of drugs.
Nine contradictions of being a teenager:
you hate your family, you love your roots, you
hate your school, you love to learn, you hate your friends but you
also hate being alone, you think you're an adult yet hate responsibilities,
you can't stand being treated like a child, but isn't that what you are?
Eight colleges almost everyone wants to go to,
and will do anything to be accepted into-
pay 100k, sacrifice every weekend to studying ("Sorry guys,
got to hit those books again."),
take out 5 loans and sudden onset insomnia.
Seven ways to get yourself killed as a teen-
drunk driving, drug overdose, getting involved with the rowdy
cheerleaders with a penchant for dying in ridiculous ways
("Did you hear about Karen? She fell off our pyramid and fractured her skull.")
Six more years until we're out of college
and in the real world- how many of us will get jobs?
How many will support their families? Only
Five of us remain with any sense of ambition.
I want to write ("That pays nothing.")
She wants to design jewelry ("Are you still in kindergarten?")
Four and a half months until I'm 16, and someone
said at some point in the world's endless circling:
"Everything you are in life, you are at sixteen, and more."
I wonder if this is true.
Three people who won't ever change, and who know that
I won't, either. Un, deux, trois of us who aren't wondering
if the keg is half-empty or half-full.
Two people make up a relationship, yet if I'm only one-half of it,
how come I do all the crushing, obsessing,
and wondering? ("I'm totally going to wear a ballgown, like the kind
with a sweetheart neckline, and he's going to wear a matching tie that
goes with the color of our napkins.")
One poem that I write late at night,
scrawling and finding synonyms for how
destructive it is to count backwards
when you're fifteen.
Counting backwards is never fun,
especially when you're fifteen.
Ten friends who misplaced their true selves,
relentlessly searching the Lost and Found
which they find in the form of drugs.
Nine contradictions of being a teenager:
you hate your family, you love your roots, you
hate your school, you love to learn, you hate your friends but you
also hate being alone, you think you're an adult yet hate responsibilities,
you can't stand being treated like a child, but isn't that what you are?
Eight colleges almost everyone wants to go to,
and will do anything to be accepted into-
pay 100k, sacrifice every weekend to studying ("Sorry guys,
got to hit those books again."),
take out 5 loans and sudden onset insomnia.
Seven ways to get yourself killed as a teen-
drunk driving, drug overdose, getting involved with the rowdy
cheerleaders with a penchant for dying in ridiculous ways
("Did you hear about Karen? She fell off our pyramid and fractured her skull.")
Six more years until we're out of college
and in the real world- how many of us will get jobs?
How many will support their families? Only
Five of us remain with any sense of ambition.
I want to write ("That pays nothing.")
She wants to design jewelry ("Are you still in kindergarten?")
Four and a half months until I'm 16, and someone
said at some point in the world's endless circling:
"Everything you are in life, you are at sixteen, and more."
I wonder if this is true.
Three people who won't ever change, and who know that
I won't, either. Un, deux, trois of us who aren't wondering
if the keg is half-empty or half-full.
Two people make up a relationship, yet if I'm only one-half of it,
how come I do all the crushing, obsessing,
and wondering? ("I'm totally going to wear a ballgown, like the kind
with a sweetheart neckline, and he's going to wear a matching tie that
goes with the color of our napkins.")
One poem that I write late at night,
scrawling and finding synonyms for how
destructive it is to count backwards
when you're fifteen.
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