Daisy Chen, Canyon Crest Academy, graduating in '26
March 29, 2023

The chalice is poison

Laced with cyanide and sugar 

A slow and painful death

Intractable agony and insufferable torture

 

The chalice is hereditary

Handed down to sip from grandfather, mother, to child

A desire manifesting in the words of a parent

A legacy through generations

Until the child strangles itself in the knot of a rope

 

The chalice is addictive

A drug worth annihilating the soul and heart 

A risk worth paying blood price for  

A pill littered across the tattered remains in the streets of Hollywood 

 

The chalice is infatuation

Heard amidst the broken notes of a lover's voice

Felt between the fingers of a rapacious entrepreneur on green paper notes

Seen in an old garage with a kid cradling a damaged guitar 

Tasted in a dish made of abstinence and diffidence

Smelt in the blood at the end of a bullet shooting a man dead 

 

The chalice is universal

Seeped into the eyes of a child from womb

Breathed into listening ears as adolescence

Taught as a practicality in curriculum 

Signed in red ink on the words brandishing our worth

 

The chalice is perpetual

Yearning sprung from seeds planted by greed

Inclination oozing into the roots of Eve’s Garden

Conceptions left on beer bottles and white powder

Ambition smelted transmutes into nails 

Hammered into the coffin of humility