The age of experience

People who don't understand
demand most to be understood
as though there is nothing and no-one
to understand but themselves,

so I reinvent myself,
retrieve myself from rejection,
extract myself from ostracism,
reassemble myself from scattered debris,
condense my vague nebulous being
and return from the exile
that started when their playground ruck
surrounded me and entertained itself
at the spectacle of my humiliation
and made clear
I would never be one of them,
and would always be isolated and alone.

I strive to satisfy their assumptions,
and make myself understandable
on terms they understand,
to infiltrate their impenetrable cliques,
and lift the siege of loneliness,

and I seem to succeed, for a while at least,
but of course, from time to time,
there is that blank stare,
that look of incomprehension
when it becomes apparent
I don't know the password.
Everyone else lisps shiboleths of childhood
with native ease,
while, an alien and tongue-tied learner,
I make no account of any worth.

I can no longer hide
the fraudulence of my familiarity,
can no longer pretend I am anyone else.
They see through every disguise.
The air bristles with rumours,
that I am still just that boy
whom no-one wants to play with.

No matter how hard we try,
we can never change,
so I retreat to the wilderness again,
and the consoling annihilation
that makes me infinite once more.