you know those coming of age movies where the teen and the mother are in the car and the mother just lectures and the teen just cries?

montages of fields and suburbs through car windows

all the houses are brick walls and red roofs

you might get a white one with a picket fence –

and you will know that those people are the lucky ones

maybe their mum is a real estate agent, maybe their dad is a doctor

or a lawyer, or an orthodontist

shiny convertible Volkswagen that they drive to the tennis courts on a sunny Sunday

maybe their kid goes to a school that makes them wear knee high socks

maybe not, you never know

you shouldn’t assume

but the fields you see in passing are dead and dying

cows standing around watching the brown grass grow

waiting for the day that they’ll be on someone’s plate

maybe the sky is a vast expanse of grey,

like you’re living in a black and white movie

or maybe it’s that harsh sort of blue-skied sunny

like a slate wiped clean, waiting to be dirtied

perhaps there is a close up

a tear slides down the teen’s cheek

or of the bloodshot redness that makes their blue eyes look icy and vulnerable

like a clean, glassy ocean bracing for pollution

but there’s no ocean,

no pollution,

just the teen and the mother and the car and the road

and the houses with the brick and the houses with the picket fence

and the monotony of weedy fields and

a sky that is boundlessly blank

the only pollution is the doubt

that the hopeless installs in the mind of the hopeful

hopeless, hopeful