—Mark Danowsky, Facebook post

We were born old, our mysteries wrapped in burlap:
scratchy, dry. We hadn’t discovered our music,
grew it in us—whiny, sad, quick to rage,
frustrated, strange. Required to survive
in pretend joyous glitz of the 80s, classic nothing of the 70s,
we were a class preparing ourselves for pointlessness.
While our parents busied diversifying assets,
we sought the other. We ran out of band names &
had to build new ones from what moved us.
Not our fashion sense. Not our grandparents’ drugstore cologne
that smelled like a night at the bar. Wars past & wars to come?
We hated them & forgot the promised annihilation—
we carried it as long as we could, then put our headphones on.