I am alive by luck at this point.
I wonder if the gun that will eventually take me has been made.
Whose trigger will bury me.
How many bullets, like a flock of sparrows, will come carry my life to its final bed.
Today, I am alive but there is no law to thank.
If not me, then someone else.
Born into a game of chance we never asked for. Traded diplomas for obituaries. Traded graduation speeches for eulogies. Traded futures for an early grave. Forced to cash in their chips. We don’t want to play anymore.
And this too is eulogy. And this too is prayer. And this too can resurrect the coffin wood back to a tree. Can sing back alive whatever parts of you died with them. Whatever leapt in your throat at yet another headline.
Mourning until you, too, are a thing to mourn.
But we will no longer be martyrs.
We are the rude awakening to politicians who pawned out our safety, who bartered our lives for bribes.
You say “gun reform is not the answer” but all I can see is a bullet rattling like a pinball in an innocent student’s jaw.
You smell like gun smoke and
I can see the AR15 you're holding behind your back and
I guess it's easy to crack jokes about dodging bullets when you're the one firing them.
Give teachers books not bullets:
Kafka isn’t kevlar.
Bronte isn’t bulletproof.
And how sick is it that we must add school shootings to your list of proud american traditions.
Throwing opinions like punches.
How many more have to die before you decide your ego isn’t as important as you think it is?
And I, too, am buried alive
My soggy grave parting its greedy lips.
To you, my bones, when ground into gunpowder and mixed into water, taste like champagne.
My pulse, as thin as an obituary panting beneath sweaty palms, and sure
We are “just kids,”
But you are forgetting we are the next generation
And you autopsy your fists.
Call it reclamatory.
Lately, when asked “how are you?” I respond with a name no longer living.
And who knows if mine will be next

He will not come dressed in a red cape and horns, no, it is so much more than that. He will masquerade as everything you’ve ever wanted. Deception is the name of the game and he knows exactly what he is doing.
Little girls who play with fire get their fingers burned and I’m still picking the soot out from underneath my fingernails.
You see, it is easy to mistake the flames for light when you don’t know any better.
Things that promise light seldom go unheard, and he isn’t any different. It sounds a little less like a fire alarm, a little more like a siren song.
And though he sets your heart ablaze, he will fill your lungs with smoke, I promise you. That is not what they mean when they say he takes your breath away.
Boys like him will only starve all of the oxygen from the room and leave you choking.
He will lick the kerosene from your palms and tell you it will quell the flames.
And he will make you believe that this is what it feels like to finally be warm.
But there is no safety in the tongues of burnished flame.
Don’t let your dignity go up in smoke.
They say fire and gunpowder do not sleep together…
Darling, be the gunpowder.
Where there is smoke, there is always fire.
Darling, he is the fire.
So follow it back to him.
After all, he is the one who started it
Darling, finish it.
Rise from the ashes of the one who thought he was fireproof all along.

poetry drips off of your tongue like honey
I wonder if you kiss me will I be able to taste it
maybe then i’ll have some honey too

and honey you know they could paint the town red with the blood they lick from our palms

And I wonder how many calories are in the flesh of the inside of my cheeks

You must clip your dead ends if you want to grow
And honey I ain’t just talking about hair

I am told I must be loved as if it is dangerous to drop me, but I cannot decide if I am glass or a grenade.
Maybe both.