It snowed last night.
When the people open their blinds,
a clean surface, a blank sheet of paper,
is what they will find.

Soon, cars will run it over, and turn it black.
Some will shovel it aside, or melt it with salt.
These things never last forever, snowflakes cease to fall with a sudden halt.
But once it's gone, you'll want it back.

Soon, it will be stained many colors.
We are curious, hard-working but messy, broken, and healing children.
Unable to fall asleep after we've been tucked in under our too-warm covers.

Red and blue flashing lights
show up too well on ivory streets.
God, they're so **** bright.
It makes me sad, somewhere tonight
a bed will have cold sheets.

Rewind. Restart. No ink marks this page.
No footprints obscure the surface, fine like alabaster.  
The script has yet to set the stage,
and the weather has not yet met it's forecaster.

Mother Nature hit the refresh button,
and gifted the world a Tabula Rasa.
Use it wisely.

I refused to open my blinds this morning.
why not.
it's always raining this time of year anyway.

I didn't spell-check this poem.
wrote it in less then a minute.
why not.

I put a period after my previous question.
That's because it was rhetorical.
why not.

I wrote ****** poetry on purpose
in the 8th grade.
why not.
Nobody's gonna care anyway.

Why not.
why not.

Let's be honest,
It doens't resmeble a bear anymore.
"Well loved." They say.
It still sleeps in my bed.
I can't seem to put it in the closet.

I got away with wearing
neon knee-highs to my
elementary graduation.
I'm glad I did that,
before everyone began comparing.

I got my hair cut
real short the day before.
you still look at me like you did when it only fell past my ears.
I don't know if you've noticed, but my hair is long now.
well, I haven't seen you in years. The gate that was open between us
has long since shut.

God, we've changed so much.
I want to stay in high school forever.
We used to hop over tide pools, until I fell in one.
When you pulled me out, my shoes were too small for me,
and I was perturbed by your once familiar touch.

I don't want to grow up.
I don't want to grow up.

I hid the bodies
underneath my ***** laundry.
The clothes I wear are always stained.
It's good. Gives me no reason to stay out of the mud.

A stranger put the skeletons in my closet.
A stranger broke up the bones
to put them in a box on a shelf.
It was simple.

Time would allow her to forget.
To cut her hair,
to visit some doctors
so they could change her cheekbones.
To dress in clean yellow dresses
that smelled like springtime.

In time, in time.
Those dresses would end up in the pile of ***** clothes,
and springtime would retire into a
never-looked-at corner
behind wooden doors,
where light enters through a thin crack, but is dissappointed,
when it has nowhere to shine.

Boney strangers stare at each other
through a panel of reflective glass:
their movements, opposite of each other.
Their hands plunge into deep pockets
and emerge with brass keys
to a wooden door,
with a crack
from a hatchet.
So unfamiliarly familiar.

Ready to flood that room with light,
ready to iron out the wrinkles in the clothes,
ready for the light's beams to reach all the corners
so that maybe something will grow.

And,
one day,
ready
to open the box
that sits alone on the dusty shelf,
and hold the dry, cold hands
of the skeletons in my closet.

My steps
are all fragments
of one very misplaced ballad.
Don't ask me why,
you don't really get a choice.
Song lyrics on a piece of
cup-ring-stained paper
cannot read themselves.

My footprints,
leave a trail into a blue mystery.
Funny, they don't disappear under-water.
I have no shoreline
to guide my misplaced strides.

And when shattered sand dollars
are reluctantly coughed up by
the wild waves of 2:00 am,
the only trail illuminated by the moon's light
is the directionless one,
who stumbles on those broken sand dollars,
to pocket 'em,
and grasp 'em tightly, with white knuckles.
They crumble under the pressure.
Everything is so truely fragile.
Sand streams out from in between fingers.

And when the sun rises,
the misplaced ballads
hide under blue covers.
I'd rather look for broken seashells at night,
then re-read my verses.
Any ballad I carry with me,
is bound to be misplaced.