A Tale Of Invulnerability Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

I was once young,
And unscathed by experience
There, a river of blood and fire
Rummage through my veins
Like mad men with rifles
Sprawling past their blatant shoulders.
And all the chagrined mothers
Prattled outside their house entrances
And talked about how their husbands
Made love to them
And how their children cried
In the wee hours of the evening.
And I sit there, idly,
Among their churning nuisances
Thinking about invulnerability,
Love, hope and other things
And my mother sat beside me,
Talking nonsensically about
How the birds are free,
And how the trees are immutably
Tethered to the Earth because of their
Stubborn roots.
And I told her and the birds and the foliage,
I am not a free and wan bird,
Nor am I a tree of obstinate fidelity.
I am a clenched fruit,
Ready for consummation -
And my seeds outpour
Those of the grains of sand,
The unblinkered marbles burning
Beside the beach.
And she told me
I had the wit of an old man,
And the structure of a handsomely burdensome lad.
And she told me,
I had duties to do,
And those were to make women cry,
And waste myself in the process
Of spinning around the cypress
Of mischief and languor.
How I hated these morals,
These lecherously shrewd tactics.
She then told me,
I am young – an invincible child
I am free – not moored to any conceited dream.
I am able – my joints are fresh and my bones
Are rigidly sturdy.
I can surpass the rivulets of time,
And I can detest the trials of senescence!
Yet, these things are taken away
By death
By love or no love at all
By hope or no hope at all
By the lions of dawn,
And the vultures that scavenge during the dusky morose.
And so, mother, you have lied
Invulnerability isn’t a place,
It is a state of mind
And I am too stubborn
To procure even my place
Inside this hazy delusions
Of being infinite
In this threading, finite world
Of mishap and
Dull perchance.