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Foreword: 2021-02-13

This poem was a collaborative effort between myself and another student in our high school English class. The poem was ultimately printed onto a transparent sheet for use with an overhead projector. If I recall the assignment correctly, the poem is our attempt to creatively describe life in high school, which we decided was best done with extremely liberal use of a thesaurus.

While I have tried to recreate the original styling as much as possible here, there are likely a few minor differences. The jagged and somewhat random positioning of a few elements was to add to the discord of the poem, providing a more evocative experience when viewed.

August 24, 2007

Hasten Dissolution

Inexorably isolate and desperately desolate
Hopeless hunger while there is nothing evermore
Waning of the unascertained never draws near
The thrall pupils of asinine precepts and their masters
The decadence of edification and its pilfering
The inept tactile affection of one neophyte for another
This is the bane of existence for secluded mortals.
Divorced from affiliation with these sadistic clans,
Their lives are aberrant, and fury lays dormant, waiting.
The never-ending plague of ignorant beings is haunting, disturbing.
All around these passageways are fallen, malicious, unforgiving entities of rage.
Meandering through tarnished gates of monotonous sorrow, lust and animosity,
They are keen to torment the aliens within their midst, determined to do so ceasingly.
The strangers cling to eroded pillars, pillars of insubstantiality and transparent veils,
Hoping for an escape from this tempest; this painful, obliterating fiend of reckless unrest.

The gaping paths through which they travel are oblivious to their intrusion, strangers in a strange land. Specters pass through these corridors, impeding and congesting its flow, regurgitating useless, senseless, verbatim bantering. The incompatibles slip through the crevices of this contorted labyrinth, into the focal abyss of a mutilated colloquium, hoping for erudition, with which they may understand more entirely the awaiting end; the bitter taste as if consuming rotting flesh and the pungent smell as though suspiring decay.

Pause,

Silence,

Then a rush of these novices through the seemingly endless halls that scourge each and every one of them. The outsiders are no longer alone in the raging battle for the freedom that comprehension has to offer them. The fighting draws to a close, and then, one word echoes the fullness of what used to be considered to be a hopeless struggle. A single adjective to describe what should have been an end, or rather, a beginning,

…

Nonexistent.