Living in Greek Letters
Here’s a not so tall tale
A little college rendition
A fun story of prim perdition
You know the scene
But regardless I’ll set it
A little ways away
From the stringent old university
In some cramped home
The men dry hump
The women slowly
Dicks tracking asses
To a bulging bassline
More efficient than
Google’s trends and twitter’s tags
The awkward outliers
Circling the edges of empty rooms
With a solitary red cup
Held up
Like a shield
And then across the room you spy it
Something all too much the archetype
Though you might try and deny it
When you see the flock
Of the similar shirted stock
Bearing Greek letters
Like crosses of chivalry.
Your mind gets rather ready
To linger and stalk
Then mock, mock, mock
Most are you human, it’s true
And though that confidence they bear
Seems to come from thin air
It isn’t worth offering the glare
But then you see the one with the backwards hat
And those pretty shoes
With un-scuffed logos
Surrounded by a sea of white
And you smell that cologne
Strong enough to let you know
It don’t come cheap
Then you hear him chant:
Alpha Zeta Gamma Kappa Pi Delta
In the way a walrus
might make a war-cry
Trying to be sincere
But ready to dive behind
A force-field of faked irony
And in one big wash
You can feel the toss
Of waves of surreality
When did I transgress,
(Your mind may stress)
To a state of stereotypes?
An existence of archetypes?
Even with stereos that
Shroud the house in noise
You can hear his constant lack of poise
One moment he nods along to little questions
From a dressed up doll
Slobbering out something droll
And the next
He’s with his brothers
Dancing like a monkey to their music box
Of quests and talks
bathed in a tradition
that never balks
He jabs a pen in the side
Of a Natty light
Taking a messy swig
of a shotgun’s delight
And in one marvelous maneuver
Stares down the empty can
Before it collides
Into an emptier forehead
Atop a face grown bloody red
Then he’ll be off to bed
Some girl with a fragile ego to be fed
Making all the outliers
In the corners of the room
Emit one great internal groan
They wonder why
The universe takes strikes
Against the nice guy
In reality they never did try
To meet a girl eye to eye
Preferring to ruffle
The skirts of the edge of the room
And flirt with empty furniture
All the “normals” have left
And now our archetype
Spends another night fingering
The cold rims of a toilet
Behind any type is a man
Once born honest and
Bereft of any plan
Just one little
C.S. Lewis soul
Possessing a body
And not a morsel more
Delivered by doctors
Into the lap of luxury
He once kicked and screamed
Ungracefully swimming away
From the world he never needed to know
I’ve never been inclined
To admit how spiritually refined
I snootily sustain I am
But I would never set a man to linger
In the hellfire spun from his own finger
Just for a lowered standard
And some mess of manipulations
Yes I digress
That a rage rises
In the depths of my
Murky red heart
When I see a man so tart
Contrive and drive Lie after lie
About how heavyweighted he is
And how many mediocre women
He’s managed to sloppily kiss
And a part of me smiles bitterly
When with spades of self-broken ties
He digs himself a hole
And with a blowtorch of disrespect gone dire
He immolates his own fool self
But in this fine land
Where we give a rapist
5 years and a slap on the hand
In this little world
Where pockets of pedo’s
Parade their exploits
I guess I am not inclined
To see a douchebag’s riches
Turned to sand
Just because he was too myopic
To see the hand of fate pull back
Ready its reprimand
All the same, I heard the “whack”
And when it came
I must confess
Despite all the guilt I bear
For laughing at tragedies too fair
I smiled on and imagined nothing changed,
Perhaps even though on how justice reigned
then hazarded a guess, that your mind did the same
~Austin R Ryan
Austin Roger Ryan writes 