BURN

By Hannah Phillips

I mourn in the company of lonely hippies

Unemployed philosophy majors with hazy eyes and

yellowing degrees flattened under Plexiglass,

clinging to the cluttered walls of their parent’s basements,

run down studio apartments that reek of sweat and mildew

Willing an imaginary world into existence as floorboards rot beneath Birkenstock-clad feet,

On winter nights with broken thermostats and threadbare sheets they are kept warm by memories of long

talks in smoky dorms and girls with long hair and pierced noses

Content to listen to the low-hum of their nicotine-scratched throats as they tell the story of their first tattoo,

making plans for the trip they’ll never take to hike the PCT

So sure that they will change the world,

Ill-prepared to find its axis hasn’t shifted and life’s spun off without them,

Now left collecting their mail in dizzied frenzies, they find she has a daughter, now, and a husband, too

And they hang their smiling portraits on refrigerator walls

It’s been five, ten, twenty years since they believed in their own promises

Naivety burning in the light of day, tinged with increasing nihilism,

Filtered through the lessons they’ve learned since and these ones didn’t cost 50k a year

As fragmented as their recollections have become, still they can’t imagine how it was that in all those

nights of heat and sex,

Dreamers plotting revolution from the boxes they did not yet know were cages, They can’t imagine how in

all those years of making plans to change the world, never once did it occur to them that they may be the

ones who’d change

But now there’s nothing to be done so they drain cans of PBR while reciting lonely soliloquies to walls that

can’t be bothered to respond.

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Hannah Phillips Poetry.

The poetry we’ve received for this Decennalia Poetry Expo is really extraordinary!