(she tastes of moonbeams)
It’s 3 am I can’t fall asleep.
there lie my battered dreams at her feet
as she does stumbling cartwheel around the school field.
she is spicy and burning
ever intense but I love it.
he is pure sugar
stuffed to the brim with chemical sweetness.
hot sauce or cotton candy?
(he is stuffing his affection down my throat)
he has always been the one I was supposed to love.
he liked me-
(you know, he like liked me)
back in fourth grade
he asked me out on his birthday
an all American happily ever after
he is punk rock and early 2000s songs
stifling instead of comforting.
she is someone who I didn’t know till last year
and even then only really knew of her.
my crush’s girlfriends friend.
we have joked about dating
sometimes she sits in my lap
she starts a spark in my stomach
and I already know she’ll be the death of me because my bones are birch driftwood and my skin is watercolor paper
I am perfectly flammable and she is perfect fire.
I love her more deeply than I even know how.
he is so temporary
a cookie cutter boyfriend
but god the taste of her lips in my head
is what keeps me up at night.
I am sorry that I cannot be who I am supposed to be.
(and you might say But Lucy! You’re dating that all American baseball boy! and I’ll say yes but he was never my first choice. give him my apologies for that, really, but there’s nothing I can do!)
so while I go to the movies and go to the mall
and get cotton candy love stuffed down my throat
her fire and my death
will be on loop
in my heart.

yes I know you love me
but please stop saying that.
It’s all so unbelievably juvenile
a kind of sugary sweet residue that lingers
on the back of your tongue and the back of your brain.
it’s a weighted blanket that is crushing me and crushing me
you’re a well-intentioned All American Boy
blond hair, green eyes,
the whole shebang.
and you tell me you love me at the back of the theatre
(we held hands the whole movie)
and here I am dying in your embrace
and you grin and grin with that dimple of yours
I want to scream LET ME GO
I am not the girl you love
I don’t want to go ride the Ferris wheel with you so we can hold hands at the top
I’d much rather longboard around the neighborhood
and run my hands through a girl’s long hair.
I’d rather the taste of cherry chapstick than cotton candy stickiness
(and yes I love you and I love you but that doesn’t mean I like it)
because you want to grow old with me
and I want to go out in a blaze with my hands wrapped around her waist.

he drinks because he is empty
empty like a used up toothpaste tube
(well, maybe there is a bit more in the old thing but why try to squeeze it out when you can just buy a new one?)
he drinks because he needs to feel something
needs to be something.
his parents always told him he would do something great
now he works at a packing peanuts company
inspecting the hunks of styrofoam for any visible defects.
he drinks because his teachers always told him to finish what he started.
he drinks because of what he could’ve been, because in this case the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.
so he takes another sip from his beer bottle.
because out of all the things he could’ve been
this is the only real possibility,
the only outcome that could ever be solid, be real
him drinking alone
in a pool of sweat and tears and years of wasted
potential

droplets of blood run down her finger
onto the pleated skirt of her uniform
she got into another fight today
they told her she was unnatural
she tells herself she doesn't believe it
but there's a sick feeling
like a parasite squirming in her stomach
feeding off her self esteem.
she opens the door and runs and runs
runs until her feet are barely held together
runs towards the edge of time and then jumps
as she's falling she hears a voice
the principal calls her into his office
he thinks she is nothing special
(he thinks he is nothing special too, but that's another thing)
little does he know the places she's been
trying to escape herself.

raindrops on the skylight
dripping down to the windows
sitting parked by the park
with a starbucks in her hand
she exhales
surrounded by calm
for now
for today
it is enough to just exist

we sit in a field
but instead of stalks of grass
there grows the faintly luminescent tails of falling stars
shimmering red or blue in the darkness.
as i gaze around, i realize that everything here
even the stars, even the sun, even the immortal face of time
is made up of me, as much as i am made up of blood and bone and tissue.
everything except you.
i am simultaneously repelled and attracted by you
so strange, so foriegn,
and yet as comfortable as chatting with an old, old friend.
so i feed a strawberry into your mouth
as you recite the verses of my thoughts
pouring them delicately into my brain
and we watch everything explode

i read poems written by professionals and grow inconceivably jealous.
they are beautiful and morbid in a honey-sweet way so you don't realize quite how bad it actually tastes until you've swallowed it.
they are the dying calls of a cow who has only known captivity, hauntingly high pitched and so human that they almost remind you of yourself.
don't get me wrong, i love them
i love reading them
they seem to understand who i am even though i don't
they seem to know my thoughts before i've thought them
which is why i hate them a bit
it makes sense, unfortunately
i'm a middle schooler (high school soon) with no training to speak of
and yet i am also the cow, i am also the sweet rotting pill of truth so why can't i write like it?
which is why sometimes when i lose motivation i go read one of their poems in the hope that practice will make my poems perfect, that practice will make me perfect.