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The Red Bull Generation

By Gabriel Ricard

I was eating breakfast
at ten o’clock in the evening,
and it was hard to keep
a conversation going with
the people at my table.

It’s just that I kept getting
distracted by some of the kids
hanging out at the other tables.

A whole bunch of good looking
youngsters dressed in upper middle
class rags and chain smoking cloves.

Laughing,
shouting,
managing to remain pretty
bright and eager to be alive,
in the face of serious clinical depression
and an IPod play list to prove
how they were just barely getting by.

They were the locals.
Exhausted from a long night
of mixed drinks and emulating
obscure icons
they didn’t know by name.

I was just a tourist,
trying to eat my eggs
and talk about the weird things
I got up to earlier in the summer.

But at one point,
I thought about what the largest
table of these cool kids would do
if I walked over to them,
waited until I had their attention,
and then proceeded to open up a vein
with the Swiss army knife
I happen to keep in my pocket.

I just wonder what they would do
if someone suddenly started spraying
them with blood
and Vincent Price laughing fits.

And then maybe,
and this is purely nothing
more than kicking an idea around,
I kill one or two of them
while they’re staring at
the French Toast they paid for
with the money from parents
who don’t really love them.

I’d really want to see how
they’d react to something
that they couldn’t take a picture
of for their MySpace pages.

The ones
that take so long to load,
they make my computer crash
just thinking about it.

But of course,
I don’t really do any of that.

I don’t have it in me,
and I’m also not terribly
fond of jail.

I just glare,
start in on the bacon,
and make quiet sarcastic remarks
to my friends.

It doesn’t do anything
to the whole self-righteous shtick
that I do so well these days
to remember that I wasn’t much
better a few years back.

How I’m not much better now.

Just a little bit older,
and a little quicker to get
to a point where it’s harder to keep
my eyes open any later than 2 a.m
than it was less than a decade ago.

Which I guess
means I’m a little bitter as well.

Copyright C 2007 Gabriel Ricard

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 11:05 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.