A Time Machine

I'm sure that sometimes everyone wishes that they had a time machine, that they could go back and change the things they got wrong, fix things.
Well in one sense poets, especially the great mass of unknown, unpublished poets, can do just that. I've been writing poetry for a long time now. The earliest ones that I have copies of were written when I was about eleven or twelve years old. And they are pretty bad, but they are by no means the worst. The worst ones are the teenage ones. They are the kind of angst-ridden nonsense that teenagers have written since teenagers were invented. And yet. And yet I can go back and revisit them, go back and adjust them. Rewrite the past.
So I've dug out my early books of verse and am embarking on a project of rewriting. I probably won't do all of them but I'm sure there is potential in quite a lot of that old stuff.

So, here's the first revamped, dusted-down, seriously flawed piece of work. It was originally written in the first person not the third, with shorter lines, looser rhymes and a few more, now completely excised, lines. There are a lot of other changes too, not least of which is the title.

Transient

He is driven by the fear of living.
He lies to preserve his illusions.
He despises those that offer comfort.
His pain is sharp and cuts confusion.
His words, like razors, rip the silence.
As by his reactions he tries to prove
The reality of his grim existence
And seeks for love at one remove.
He is carried on by his momentum,
And by the power of his self-loathing.
He does not pause for contemplation.
His verbal armour, protective clothing.
He finds he can't relax the tension.
He finds he cannot speak the truth,
So no one understands the problem
And he remains a transient youth.

OK, it's still fairly poor but this is the first trip out for the time machine. And that was the first poem I found on page one of the teenage me's notebook... and I'm not completely ashamed of it.