Gold, Mortality and Everything in Between || Poetry ✓

A NOT-REAL-ENOUGH POEM on Teenagehood

On the night of my 20th birthday,
I put my phone on silent as a
Last act of teenage rebellion.
It's not a metaphor, I actually did that and my friends were quite mad at me.

The following are a set of metaphors I would be using in this poem to talk about my teenage -

Scratch that.

I couldn't find any metaphors.

Metaphors are for poetry
And poetry is for feelings
And I can't really write a poem on my teenage years
Because teenagehood is just a "phase" filled with fake-feelings, right?
Full of not-real-enough-experiences,
Not-hard-enough-decisions,
Not-valid-enough-emotions.

Say the word 'teenage' out loud,
Spell out its letters one by one -
Do you see a trampoline?
Bouncing along the no-mans-land between young and old -
For seven years, I wasn't young enough or old enough
And therefore not "real" enough
And I don't know how to write a poem on that.

Let's repeat this spelling exercise -
T E E N A G E
Do you see a body
Made of clay?
Too fragile for your bouncy houses,
Too ugly for your glass castles?
Do you see a body
With boots lined with the mud noone can see because well,
It's made out of clay!
Clay bodies don't know what's it's like to get their hands roughened up,
To scale the real mountains - there are stock mountains and political mountains and more political mountains - and
I don't know how to write a poem on that either.

My lack of ability (could've just used the word inability) to pen down a creative piece is starting to concern me,
I'm 20 now, see
This would've been fine a year or two ago
When I apparently wasn't wise enough,
When all my creative pieces weren't complete and large enough -
My love poems weren't "true love" poems
My retrospective poems weren't "truly retrospective" poems
My rant poems were - well, they were "ranty" enough alright,

I'm sorry but spell out TEENAGE once again for me, will you?
Do you see the dragon-fire emoji?
All rage and no action?
All yellow and orange but no warmth?
All rebellion and no respect,
All sarcasm and no sense - just like this poem of mine?

See, on the night of my 20th birthday,
I put my phone on silent as a
Last act of teenage rebellion.
And yes, if it wasn't obvious enough already,
It was and is
A dead metaphor.