the sixteenth year

To waste away such precarious youth

tiptoeing on canvas, knee-deep in paint and

coughing in the dust and ash of

the trespassed and vandalised and explored

is a sin, sealed only on weekdays

gagged in a test tube,

buried alive under congealed pages,

when the heart is closed and the

mind is either a 24-hour non-stop

marching band with its throbbing

cymbals and and its thundering feet or

a funeral procession.

Because the drums may scream triumph

of some papier-mâche success

but the porcelain child’s voice ebbs away,

while the growing pains do not

and yet, they insist, they urge

in their doctrinaire wisdom

aged, fermented, rotted like fine wine,

that it is still a sin 

to waste the sixteenth year 

on anything else, God forbid,

but my sixteenth year.