what you own in poetry

breaking what you own yourself
can absolutely be punk rock
only if the things you break
were things from cheap or free
and half-broken to begin with
if they are in working order
even that isn’t punk rock
then that’s just wasteful
and stupid but at least
it’s your own stuff to break

this world isn’t about you
it’s a little bit about you
but mostly it isn’t about you

breaking someone else’s stuff
if they’re a monster doing daft things
maybe that’s a revolutionary act, I guess
if you have a solid plan on what
it is you’re going to build up next but
if you’re doing it just to feel cool
or edgy or whatever without calculations
of the unintended consequences of your actions
it is flat out moronic
like a fifteen year old in a Che Guevara shirt
hurting their gay friends by wearing it out
because Che may have seemed rebellious but
he executed homosexuals on site and did
a lot of other horrible stuff you don’t learn
by spending twenty bucks on a CD at Wal-Mart

this world isn’t about you
it’s a little bit about you
but mostly it isn’t about you

breaking someone else’s stuff, though
if they’re good people trying to help you
if they don’t have much nice stuff of their own
just to look cool and edgy
just to be the centre of attention
I’ll never get that and anyway
anybody can tear stuff down
anybody can break things
anybody can burn the world down
it doesn’t prove a talent or tenacity
it doesn’t prove a skill or a strength
anyone with a bat, a match or a gun
can tear things down
can break stuff, can
disrupt the paradigm for laughs
it isn’t cool
it’s narcissistic

this world isn’t about you
it’s a little bit about you
but mostly it isn’t about you

breaking stuff is easy as hell
building new stuff is harder than fuck
but the hardest thing of all is
maintaining the good stuff already here
it’s not so flashy as breaking or building
but we live in a universe whose physical laws
are ruled by the demon entropy
everything wants to collapse in upon itself
unless you put a lot of energy back in
just to make it stay the same
to keep the nice things nice
for as long as you can
maintaining the good things, of course
isn’t as flashy as proving
that you can break stuff but
it is the best thing in the world to do

this world isn’t about you
it’s a little bit about you
but mostly it isn’t about you
act like it