First Try: Forget the Jokerman.

Friend,

I've decided I'm not a poet. I don't think I'll let anyone call me that ever again. Someone I love told me the other day I was only good enough for his table scraps, and it hurt me like I don't think I can express in verse. So I've decided I'm not a poet. My brothers and sisters, and me, we deserve more than that. Our love is worth more than that. Our cradle's been on fire since he and his friends spoke it, and they've gotten old. I say under the table's just shame. Forget him.

The prophet and the philosopher, they've been dancing on my walls, on my screen, for some time now. I don't know if I'm supposed to be entranced anymore, but I definitely want to scream. They offer light and then they hide it; they laugh at me for my darkness.

Around every corner is another green-eyed clown calling some teenager a copycat. We're being warned of stolen thoughts. As if our minds should be locked like doors. Don't you think that the sage, whoever he was at first, had a hero? You know, their savior is still dead. And he had the keys to the world. Ours is being born, but he's not so arrogant as to imagine nobody has ever hoped before.

Can't you see them? They're out in the desert, their legs thinned to breaking. They twist in the withering wind of the dinnertime hours and they reach out to carve us in their image. They're watching the sunset, yelling about how the day changed everything. They don't expect yesterday, they don't remember tomorrow. We've been watching with them, but I think it's time we stopped and refused to go to bed at bedtime. I don't want to hear anyone my age say they were born too late ever again.

I ask that those that matter join me in flying into the sky while everyone else is asleep, in pushing the world into the misty squinting stretch-chill hours. We won't footnote the crown when we pry it from the pedestal, but we'll love it. We'll love it like they loved us and we loved him. In gold and silver and purple and shine, we'll weave ropes to connect us as we crash into the horizon to bring the dawn.

Consider this my resignation from the Twentieth Century.

Regards,

Jonas Briedis