Teenage Riot and Other Poems
Teenage Riot
All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing else
mattered but to learn some new trick,
to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting
around our bodies when we flew
off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted
into a 180, kicking
a leg out and landing it, the only way to run
through the neighborhood
was to run through it
together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost
don’t even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum
and how they smelled so different
from us, sitting in some kid’s basement drinking
his parents’ vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack,
jumped in when some one of us
got jumped,
so when a man we had never seen before
came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked over to the man
like someone walking into a bank
and stabbed him.
The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt,
right in the middle of his new consciousness,
kind of looking around.
