GENRE SPECIFIC

She hides her pretty eyes
beneath a mask of mascara
and indifference.
Her face is a brood
of sullen glances
stolen from silent screen actresses
dead long before she
was even conceived.
She says she's not sad
just concerned
for a world going to shit,
a world where achievement means nothing
and celebrity is everything.

She says she has no one
to look up to,
no positive role models except
Emo rock stars
not much older than she.
She says no one has any idea
how hard it is being who she is,
just as her older sister,
her cousins, her aunts
and her mother thought before her.
No one understands;
they don’t think or act like her
and obviously don’t care.

What she fails to realise,
(and something I all too readily understand
with the benefit of experience),
is that while ‘emo’ might mean emotional,
there are so many more emotions
than just glum or morose.
I’m sure she will wake up one day,
strip away the gloom and doom
and emerge, like a butterfly,
from her cocoon
to fly off into a brilliant future
where she will outshine
everyone around her.