In my mind I've lived and died
Seen shores swallowed by the tides
Waiting for you

All along I knew you'd come
Underneath familiar sun
You were there
Somewhere

Maybe you never stopped to wonder
If the stars that fill the sky your under
Shine on me too

Maybe you never stopped to think if the same winds that kissed your cheek
Kiss mine too
And

Maybe you weren't waiting for me
But I've been waiting for you

Restless tonight
Strange
The things exposed in absence of light

My demons snarl
Yet
So do I
A morbid pleasure
I can't seem to hide

To be so close
To what I fear most
And still possess the urge to smile

And when day breaks the seams of night
And allows the sun to bleed my eyes
A glass blown glaze affects my sight
A candy coax
A paperweight
Upon the desk
Of time and fate

But when night falls
As it always does
Reality crawls
To oxidize my rust.

Tomorrow is the day
I have imagined
For nearly
Two decades.

I am almost two decades old.

I never really pictured myself
In the ruffled, black
Window drape
And
Cardboard diamond.
Standing with "all my friends"
While everyone I love washes
Me to my diploma with tears of
Pride and joy.
I pictured the end.

Naive.
Of course.

But at six years old
Everyone made high school
Out to be
Life
And then life goes on
Hiatus
While we work our dream jobs
Raise kids and
Die.

Ironic.

It is always those preachers of
" Practicality"
Who make that dream
A goal.

Youth is idolized and coveted.
But like the
North Star
It was
Ignorance
Who led me through the darkness
Of my adolescence.
Not beauty or
Vitality.
Blind Faith and
Forced hope
In all the
Inevitable failures
That would seemingly lead me
Through a life time of
Social experiments.
Or as society prefers,

"friendships."

Ironic.

As it was I was being tested
More than I was testing.

Tomorrow
I will be graduating with
176
Cardboard diamonds
And of most of them
I only know
Their names.

Some led me to believe that they could sparkle
But in the end
Couldn't stomach the
Entirety of a mine.

So tomorrow we will be handed
Paper telescopes
Through which it is
Advised
To look towards our
Futures.

Cardboard diamonds will not look.

They will wipe their brows.
Flatten and restrict
Their futures to a
Five dollar plastic
Frame
And hang it on a wall as
Eggshell or beige
As the next 40 years of their
Hiatus.

Some led me to believe that they were pearls.
But in the end
Just couldn't bare the patience of
Becoming.

I am no cardboard diamond.
But I am not quite a pearl.

The day after tomorrow
I will be the same
Grain of sand
That I have been
For the past
18 years.

And for this,
I am truly
Grateful.

I remember the first time
My heart felt
Sick.
Sick for someone else.
Her face has faded from my
Memory
But not the feeling of my chest
Hollowing
For the first time.

Every pulse spent with her
Was like that of a fist
Hitting the head of a drum from
The inside.

Or like sinking.

A soft, crumbling
Concave.
Like fleeting footprints in
The sand of a bad
Dream.

I suppose it was pity, mostly.
Slumped with the stature of a
Vulture.
All crooked and
Insecure.
Of course my adolescence couldn't
Identify
With the terminology
Of such a foreign
Energy.

She wasn't alarming.

There was a subtleness to her.
She was like creeping
Quicksand.
Only,
I didn't know I was being drawn in
Further
Until the air became
Thick
To breath.

She wasn't evil.

There was a
Timidity
To her.
She radiated
Stagnancy.
Something I had never
Audienced before.

She was like the only
House
One finds at the
End
Of a road long
Forgotten
By civilization and
Laughter.
Broken and splintered from the Weight
Of buried burdens and
Contraventions
Of the white picket fenced
American
Dream.

She was like the figure one
Reluctantly
Forms in the
Dark
And her
Silence
Was the comforting thought that
Nothing
Is ever really there.

I know it's because of that
Forced
Reassurance
That she oozed the
Disregarded
Desperation
Of an
Unsolved
******.
The one tossed in a
Box and thrown on a shelf.

Overlooked.

To think of it
Now
I can't help but wonder if

The others saw her too.

Time has shown my ignorance.
How is it
All my gold languishes in the
Shadows of my own intentions
Melting in the fire of my aspirations
Only to flood the gutters of
Redundancy .

I might as well limit my oxygen
To a plastic sack.
Then again,
I wouldn't be the first.