posers

There is this girl I get to thinking about a lot when I’m staring out of train windows, or just daydreaming instead of working. She was just a girl hanging around in our little punk world of friends, fans and acquaintances. Same as everybody else at the age of sixteen, she liked the music, was starting to delve into the ideas but since she was new and was still finding herself no one paid much attention. She left.

now I hear she’s got a dickhead westy boyfriend and they all go drinking every single weekend. I wonder to myself, is she happy? Does she still care about the political things we started to talk about?
Sometimes when looking through old photos I see pictures of me and widget when we were fifteen and sixteen, they embarrass the hell out of me. I had a rude blonde undercut and didn’t know shit. When we’re getting out of our Marley fase and into our punk stage listening to all the big punk bands like Offspring, Greenday, Frenzal. We used to do things that kids would be more than disowned for now. I remember going to lame teenage drinking parties and putting a tapes of songs and jumping around and singing, just us two in a shed of people staring and laughing. We were posers.

The word poser means young. The word poser stands for new. I’m ousting it from my vocabulary. I think about this girl who came into the punk scene to see what it could offer and found it had nothing but cults of personality and vanity. So she decided to find herself somewhere else in a scene where people were more apathetic than we pretended to be.

Every kid is searching for an identity, for something to cling to, to say yeah this is me and if you don’t like it get fucked. We all need a scene at that time in our lives to give us the strength to find ourselves. Now days I wouldn’t call myself a punk. I don’t dress to impress like I once did, I don’t crave coolness, but I did come out on the other side of punk happy and strong. I throw a lot of angry words around about people who are walking clichés, in a punk uniform, but for all our screwed up little world’s flaws it’s still a much better place to grow than the other scenes out there.

Every time I see an awkward kid standing at the edge of the crowd, not too confident, not to sure who’s watching or what there thinking. I know I was that kid. It’s our responsibility in the punk-political scene to make this a place where kids can come gather knowledge of self, gather strength, and have hell loads of fun just being themselves.

Lets get of this high horse of ‘yeah I’ve been here for years’ and realise that it is up to us to save each other from the mainstream and from the fucked up violent subcultures that have nothing close to good intentions.