Shining Light Into This Dark Teen Cave Poem by Sarah Mkhonza

You look into the cave and see a corner, ,
With teens huddled in the same fear,
That had you running years ago
Only to find that is was as unreal
As the word itself.

You write a short poem to shine a beam,
Into the corner and ask a few to come,
And read together the truth about life,
For it is hard to be a teen assured,
Of the truth you have been denying all along.

Your friends are the only 'knowers' around,
The poets are far away if not dead like this one.
They write musings from another world,
Where people are green to the core,
And red like the sand on the surface of Mars.

Who can tell a teen what they have seen,
When their eyes were goggled by mascara,
And lashes as long as those of a ghost,
For they see through such things and know,
How fake the thing called beauty has become.

I sing and dance songs with the teens,
And ask them to show me how it is done,
They laugh and say I learned the jive,
Of good old township music played on
A disc, that was only a thirty three,
When they know only forty fives.

I tell them it is not about numbers,
But about the act and the feeling it brings,
This gyration of our bodies to false pop songs,
That we do on this plane where we write the script,
That will be used for the movie of a teens life.

They say they know that these days adults talk,
And then go and vote for people who predate, on
The brains of women and the youth they call
Millenials, for they know only the year,
When the century turned older than them,
And ended up face down on the plateau of time,
For stalagmites and stalactites do not joke,
When they hit the back of the head of a crazy teen.