My youth was a dream and the world was too fleeting—
Too soft. I was numb as my puberty vanished
To studies and wages. I wasted that moment
I waited—like Prufrock—too long in deciding.
It passed and a fungus has spread past my ankles.
My pulverized teeth from the decades of gnashing
Are cracked and the doctors are puzzled; the experts
Confused by this rotting. They cover my surface
With topical ointments. I'm waxen. My body
Is brittle. The organs are failing, no matter
The claims of the voices from boxes. I notice
The quadrangles speak and allay all my terrors.
I wake at that moment with caps on incisors.
And somehow the surface of things has a logic
I missed all these years. Now I'm numbing the limits
Of what I expected and leave it to masters
Of detail to map out my personal progress;
To drain from my pelt all those troublesome innards
And lead me away from this squandered potential.
“One was a spoiled child so prone to fits of rage — fights, screamed insults, threats — that his parents began taking him to psychiatrists at age 6 and medicating him in a vain struggle to control his moods... The other was arrested three times in less than four months for petty crimes, and seemed like an aimless youth — until he developed a passion for a strict version of Islam that shocked and alienated his Dominican family.”
– Kareem Fahim, Richard Pérez-Peña and Karen Zraick, The New York Times, June 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/nyregion/12suspects.html?hp
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