If I Could Go Back........ Poem by Rojina Aktar

If I could travel back in time
To the joys, buzzes, excitement, ecstasy of the youthful whims of teenage fantasy, I d scoff and tell myself 'these feelings won't last forever, no matter what you yearn for, it won't always be! '

You reach twelve or an earlier age that puberty takes you under, when five pretty boys serenade you into wet-dream lust-driven wonder, tearing studies & education asunder,
Yet ten years or so later you ll lament 'what was I thinking, what influence was I under? ! '

Once you reach fifteen, you tear yourself away from Twitter,
You meet a boy nearer to your own age who's just 'so much fitter', it's a gargantuan race to pop your cherry, because you ve both reached & raring for that stage, but when the deed is done & he has his mates approval,
Years later you ll be sighing 'Oh, sod it, it's never like how they make out on Instagram, what was ALL the rage? ! '

Out of the blue year twelve descends,
Your parents soul aim is for you to knuckle down and pass with flying colours 'as the opportunities for you will never end! '
'You can be whatever you desire, a junior doctor, a teacher, a medical chiropracter! ', You nod & agree when all you yearn for is to win the X factor

You sign up, audition, win a place, land a primetime TV slot, win the contest feeling lucky as you re barely out of school,
And after the adulation, widespread recognition and endless promotional tours & parties you ll be full of glee 'that to turn this down you d have been a fool! '
Yet eight years later when you re churning out the same manufactured pop fodder and it has lost all of its novelty,
The sad realisation hits that you re just an object of corporate puppetry

Should you gain and take up a place at university, to make something of yourself, a career or impress mummy & daddy as impossible that may be,
As all you re interested in blowing your student loan on nights out, getting wasted or laid, smoking hash & buying all the high street clobber that you see

You tell yourself 'I'm a student, I don't follow rules,
I'm supposed to be cool! '
Yet should you reach your chosen vocation or twenty years of dead-end jobs you ll be kicking yourself for being a 'clueless tool'

Adolescence, a long perpetually confusing experience of a valuable rite of passage, that is meant to shape us into the adults into who we grew,
Yet most of it is wasted into fleetingly irrelevant pursuit of fulfillment,
If only we knew