Delinquents all! We held a secret
National conference in 1987,
Declared out of fiendish malice
By a unanimous show
Of infant’s trembling hands

To be a divided generation of spoiled-rotten,
Cell phone-obsessed, pot-smoking slackers,
Militia of ungrateful mamas’ boys and daddies’ girls,
Debutante poets or derelicts with cans of spray-paint
And shit-eating grins. Playboys, pipe bombs,
Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water
Stored in rotting tree-shacks

With cherished flasks of homemade napalm
We infants burnt down all those two-parent households
Causeless rebellion–no war, everybody’s happy now–
To reject an America that was otherwise pure

Brian Le Lay’s first full-length book of poems, Don’t Bury Me in New Jersey, is available from Electric Windmill Books. His second book, Smile for the Customers, is forthcoming from Brass Seahorse Books. Recent poems have appeared in Hobo Pancakes, The Rusty Nail, and Gutter Eloquence. He blogs athttp://www.conceiveyourself.blogspot.com

© 2012 Brian Le Lay