I haven't thought about love for a while

whispers of broken dreams crawl into the cracking walls I call my heart.
I've tried to fill it with
                          red balloons
                          peanut butter
                          wind
                          touch
                          work
but the cement never holds.
I'm ever-turning towards your endless gaze like a sunflower that worships the sun and
I think you are burning me and I think it hurts.
Caress my wilted fingers between your palms and speak nothings onto my cheek,
carry me down the sloped hills we call adventure.
I've been consumed by love and fear and everything between and
I can't catch up with your rough, calloused soles.

The fireflies are the prettiest and they are the easiest to catch. I would imagine them quick, but they lumber on with the weight of a protective light. They are easily snatched from among the leaves of sleeping branches and caught between the chubby fingers of the little ones, captive until their dying days.

I'd tell you how to catch me if I knew how. I'd tell you how simple it is to hold my careless gaze and read my mind-waves washing onshore my face if I knew where to find you a snorkel. Smiles always frighten me but eyes tear me away from reality.

Really I would imagine running away from the world and all of its distractions into salty air with your calloused hands and soft eyes nightly, if my dreams would allow it.

Yours

A SLAM BY ME

Yesterday I looked in the mirror and remembered what I wasn't.  My face was tired and sunburned and different and not cool.

Because the cool is for the champions and the swag is for the the players

The pretty is for the blondes and the beautiful is for the rich brunettes who drive old cars with new speakers.

Sometimes the smart have a grasp on control and the techies have got a definite hold on the future.

The girls who keep knowledge in a little box on their bedside table always forget where the key is in the search for pretty, and

The boys who are lyrically gifted are endlessly searching for strength and recognition.

Yesterday I stared back at the mirror and tried hopelessly to look into both my eyes at the same time to see if they matched.

But I'm sure it doesn't matter what you have as long as you've got it, and it doesn't matter where you are going as long as you are moving, and the power of growth is more important than whether you're going straight up or not, and it doesn't matter if your eyes match as long as you can see the world around you. Find what you've got and write it on your nametag, tape it in your notebook, slap it on your car bumper.

wear it like a tattoo on your arm, 

Or your chest,

Or your face.

Definitely wear it on your face.

Use it to intimidate people and to scare away gangsters. Use it to expose yourself to love and life and living, because it is your ticket to ride the plane to the stars, where you are so enveloped in light that nobody can see anything but the intensity of your good. 

Hold its hand and don't let it stray or  get kidnapped or get hit by a car. Because your cool makes you a champion and your pretty is your own and your smart is your future. Your face belongs to you only and your hands are yours to use. So Forget about the mirror and see yourself in the reflection of your stars, untainted by the world and perfected in the white light in their corners. Think less about the skin and  more about the flesh, less of the body and more of the soul. Stop wishing for Nutella and find some money to buy it with. An idea is the stone, but the labor becomes the masterpiece. Shatter the mirror, break your mold, YOLO, senior year. Put it in your pocket and keep it safe because now it's yours.

SENIOR YEAR:

                                                       

 

The Majestic

Trampled feathers lie on the ground
where the wings of the Majestic once spread;
their greater span reaching the tips of the continents
and warming the slightest complaint.

The Majestic, now naked, shivers under the weight
of the ocean breeze whispering over the mountains.
A pitiful figure, once the queen of the skies,
now hunched with a burden of pain.

Silently, silently, her pride is diminished,
as onlookers ogle the previously omnipotent.
A wonder that such as the Majestic should
fall so terribly and so quickly.

Never to soar, or whip past the rooting birds,
the Majestic weeps with shame, filled with
past wishes and endless regret.
A standard for the world, now burnt.

And as the Majestic crumples, she only
wishes she were a Phoenix.

goodnight you beautiful girl

Typing nonsense to memorize that I'll forget two weeks later.
Working for the grade, working for the numbers.
Always the numbers,
Numbers make sense.
I'm holding a mango flavored popsicle in my hand and I don't have enough time to lick the drips running down the dense, cracking wood of the stick and onto my dry knuckles and flaky skin.
I'll never have the time to make a peanut butter sandwich for a starving child in Africa
or order a pan pizza from Dominos.
I'm running out of seconds in my never-ending tetris game and I'm counting the days until I can stop taking my vitamins. I can feel salty wet under my eyelids but I whisper, Stop. We can't have that. It doesn't fit in our schedule.
 7:20 Drive to school
7:22 Honk at the person who cut in front of you
7:25 Make eye contact with a lamp
7:28 Park
I'm sorry, I can't fit that smile into my schedule.
I'm sorry, I can't fit that boy into my schedule.
I'm sorry, I just simply can't fit you or thoughts of you or anything or any person or any glance or thought or moment into my schedule.

Sometimes I feel like I'm walking into planned nothingness with no ultimate goal or purpose, swimming without water wings and drifting into space without a lifeline, calling for help but gasping for oxygen.
My sternum breaks under the pressure of all the lists stacked on top of me that I've never completed.
Literally I feel like I have a collapsed lung when I see faces of the past in my nightmares.
Last night I dreamt of you and your wonderful touch and your knowing hands. Hands that caressed my face and touched the hollow of my waist and begged me to forgive you. Hands that made bracelets in a weird sort of way and always bought me Roxberry. Your breath in a whisper caught me instantly and suddenly I was in love with a boy who I never see and talk to like he never left when I see him. And all I hear is love, love, love me. And I trip and fall and stumble and never blush. I wish I could blush.
And all the time you are drifting away, still softly humming, "Goodnight you beautiful girl. Goodnight."