Two Poems about Growing Up

Two Poems on Growing Up

I

The recipe for 'grownup' is'nt complex -
Three things: the first a set of faces: one
For sneering, chuckling, shouting. Thing the next:
A roll of bandages for putting on
If you, by chance should graze your grownup blades
Across the tender skin beneath your wrist.
The last? You need a book, blank or pre-writ,
To exercise the parts you might have missed
When scalpelling out the withered child bits.
They're like the burn-marks on a frying pan -
You grind them down, but always leave that look
Of bloody-brown, like paint from ancient hands
Cluthched into walls of caverns. But a book
Will let the crackling remnants run their course,
Then shut them in their covers by sheer force.

II

The Cancer of Maturity
Metastizes slow
It splays across your bangs, at first
And creeps into your clothes.

It slips onto your lips at night,
Your throat, and then your breast
Then Lodges in your diaphraghm
And echoes with your breath.

The lungs rebel and bloom their youth
Into an angry mass,
A cancer as the cancer's foe -
The two begin to clash.

But youth imbues it's vital strength
Into a killing blow.
Adulthood reels, but lives, then waits,
Metastasizing slow.

(Image by Valerie Everett. Herein describing the inside of my wrist (which, no, I've never 'grazed' with 'grownup blades', and never intend to, no worries :D), this concludes my somewhat irregular tour of the pictures on the top of my blog. )