nature gave
bright colors
spikes, spurs 
and loud noises
         
to its endangered ones, 
its helpless pretties,
to keep them safe
but nature
         
forgot us,
the casualties of adolescence
who inherited a cold 
war   a race war
         
a class war    a sexual 
revolution   a battle of the sexes   an energy
crisis and one question:
why are you so hostile?
         
we ransacked our childhoods 
to armor ourselves:
stole the ivory soap that could not 
keep us clean, stole the elmer's
         
glue that held neither 
our school projects 
nor our families 
together
         
used it
to bully our hair up
into arrowheads,
hypodermic tips,
         
barbed wire fences
and buzz saw blades;
then conjugated fuck five
different ways:  fuck you,  fuck this
         
fuck that, fuck everything
and fuck off
and went to see the Ramones.
we circled around each other
         
tight and low
as toxic as possible
to discourage predators
from attacking 
         
while the band's three-chord crunch
did everything that parents,
schools and churches
could not.
         
when they yelled
GABBA GABBA HEY   WE ACCEPT YOU    WE ACCEPT YOU
we threw our molotov cocktail bodies
after the sound
         
from a six-foot stage.
the air, the adrenaline
sang in our veins that 
since bruises are nothing new,
         
there are only new bruises
and we waited for
the only impact
we knew how to make
         
but for the first time
GABBA GABBA HEY 
hands 
caught us
dragged us 
from 
the nothing 
of the air
flipped the bird 
to gravity
soared us over 
the garden of heads
that thrashed like flowers
in a storm
gave a fuck you to natural 
law as we sailed 
legs 
over heads
GABBA GABBA HEY
over asses 
over elbows
         
split our lips
tore our clothes 
stole our boots but
those hands
         
WE ACCEPT YOU
did not 
let us
fall.
				
         
Copyright Daphne Gottleib 1999