The Youth Notebook Poem by Paula Glynn

The youth notebook, celebrity posters and magazines
Wanting to know everything they can discover
From photos of fad celebrities and fashion models
To advice articles about relationships and health
And how to manage passing their school exams.

They quickly write in their 90's paper diaries
Their penmanship showing their youth
Their diary entries sharing the secret truth
Of their school days and school holidays
Fights with friends and family showcased.

They collect teenage magazine articles
And put them in a colourful A4 folder
Wanting to read and keep articles from
Sugar magazine and Just 17 magazine
To forbidden and grown-up Cosmopolitan.

Those old issues of 90's Cosmopolitan magazine
Read with wonderful fascination one after the other
Articles about wealth, career, health and lovers
Where women take valuable and professional advice
Their love lives improved: hopefully not in vain.

The youth does also write in their school notebook
Drawing doodles to silly cartoons and caricature
Also putting fun and young stickers on them
And even decorating their boring pencil cases
With fun, young and quirky stationary stickers.

Postcards sent to friends about family trips abroad
Handwritten letters also sent to friends
When the idea of friendship seems the right time
Friends loving their happy sticker-bound letters
Where their friend's writing gets better and better.

These memories stored forever in notebooks
These memories stored forever in paper diaries
And - certainly - a diary with a mini lock and key
Hidden underneath the barely used bed
Youths just not wanting to go to bed early.

And youths go out underneath the moon of the summer night
With their good school friends instead
The teenage life sometimes tough
But the immortal and important youth notebook
Does take the teenager with their parents off the hook.