Prelude: Children of the Age of Apathy

I won't make you readers suffer my poetry -- or experiments with verse, really -- very often. But I've been trying to get the feel for certain meters, and have also been thinking about reaching out to some of the frighteningly apathetic people I have known. And if this doesn't rhyme it's probably a mercy, really. I've read too many poems that the best you can say for them is that they rhyme a lot. This doesn't have even that to offer ... ;)

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Have you looked on beauty once too many times
To be gladdened by a flower or the sky?
Have you reached for hope to watch it slip away
Too often to stretch out your hand again?
Have you blown out all your wishes every year?
Considered death to be a well-earned rest?

Has a hardened heart become a commonplace?
And smiling hope now seems the lot of fools?
Has your frustrated and despairing cry
Gone unanswered til you give it no more voice?
Would honest tears now seem a sign of life
To know your soul is not beyond repair?

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I know, I know, some of those lines could be reworded easily enough if I wanted rhymes. But rhymes seem jarringly wrong for reaching out to people who smirk at the whole "smiling hope" scene.