i’ve never been religious but i’ve always known how to pray,
words worn down by my tongue like a security blanket.
it’s been years since i’ve thought about what they actually mean;
it’s like my pledge of allegiance, i don’t pray,
i recite.

repetition repetition repetition
my brain’s in fission
i pledge allegiance to the flag--
we only loved behind closed doors
of the united states of america--
i’ve heard if you say something enough times it stops sounding like anything at all
and to the republic for which is stand--
i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you
one nation under god--

i usually leave that part out.
close my mouth, stand silent.

silence is for sinners and we are losing battles of people.

in my history textbook there is a picture
of a man shoving a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle.
just the same,
you’re the kind of person who’d go planting flowers
on the side of the road just to make it prettier,
you’re always wasting your time caring about people
who couldn’t give a **** about you
and it’s probably tragic or something
but words like tragic and poetic are for different people than us.

i am so ******* bad at gentle and you’re deserving of delicate.
i think some people are less impressionable in the way the take up space
than they are in the holes they leave when they’re gone.

i used to imagine that there were phantom versions of myself,
standing everywhere that i have ever stood
like ghosts or maybe more like placeholders.
waiting.
it’s like how when i was a little kid,
i would try to picture what the spot i was standing in
looked like a hundred, a thousand years ago.
who has treked through through the same places
that i go everyday.
i still like to think like that sometimes.
i like to think we leave behind echoes of ourselves
in the places we’ve been.
i like to think that a hundred, a thousand years from now,
there is going to be a little kid trying to do the same,
picturing me standing here.
i still like to think there is a version of me
hanging around in my childhood home, six years old with
missing front teeth.
i still like to think there is a version of me
wandering around all my favorite cities i’ve visited.

by this logic, there is still a version of you
in the room i last saw you in,
still framed by the light pouring in from the window.
by this logic, there is still version of me
in the room i last saw you in… waiting.
for something.

i’ve planned out my whole funeral.
which probably makes it sound like i’m a lot more interested  
in dying than i actually am
but i just--
i think my problem is that i was never the type of person to plan ahead.
i never have imagined my college life,
or my future career, or how many kids i might i have.
i’m one of the only people i know
that has never tried to picture their own wedding.
my mom says that’s a good thing,
keeps me away from unhealthy expectations
but she’s my mom
and it’s like how your mom always tells you that you’re pretty
because what the **** kind of mother
doesn’t correct their kid’s self-loathing or at least try to?
my mom, she’s pretty used to me lying on my kitchen floor
in the throes of an existential crisis
because existential crisis is sort of my nom de plume
and before anything else,
i am afraid to be someone disappointed by my own dreams.
but i think because i never tried my hand at planning
i have no idea where i’m supposed to be in my future,
i have no idea what i want.

see the thing is,
i’m afraid i’ve never really fit in comfortably anywhere in,
i’m just really good at pretending i do.
if i wanted to swan dive into my psyche a little bit more,
i’d chalk it up to all my biracial bicultural biwhatever *******:
that feeling that i’m two things at the same time
and i don’t know where i fit.
in simple terms:
i’m too white for the latino kids
and not white enough for the white kids.
in complicated terms:
i’ve got close family about 4000 miles away
and i feel really ******* guilty for not loving them
as much as my family in the next state over,
and i resent them for not getting who i am
like my family 4000 miles away does.

i don’t think i know anyone who worries quite like i do.
see i’m not unhappy, really,
but maybe i’m the saddest happy person i know.
i try not to think about it too much,
but my brother tells me it’s because i think too much;
he’s one of those people who is frustratingly self-assured
even when he’s not.
i told him to play highway to hell at my funeral half as a joke
but mostly because i can’t even stand to imagine
the thought of outliving him.
we’re the weird kind of siblings who adore each other senselessly.
identical, two halves of a whole,
we are the same person a so many ways.
he’s the reason i exist in a completely unpoetic way --
he wanted a little sibling so much
that i joke that he begged me into existence.
he is the only person who’s ever laughed at the right parts of my jokes.
he tells me to stop worrying about tomorrow like he already has.
i think this is our key difference.

i like stories because i like escapism,
i think poetry is the only time i’m really… myself.
it is what it is and it isn’t what it isn’t,
and i loved harry potter because i wanted to be magic
and i loved star wars because i wanted to be a galaxy far, far away.
and i love how i met your mother
because everyone loves lily and marshall, right?
and everyone wants that, right?
to love someone that much,
to be so ******* sure about somebody
even when everything else is ****.
i’m just afraid that i’m never going to get that.
which is cliche but all cliches had to start somewhere
and i think people actually hate cliches
more because of the fact they’re so inescapable true
rather than the fact that they’re corny.
i’m mad at the TV for selling my a dream i’m not sure i get to have
and i’m mad at life for not imitating art well enough
and i’m mad at life for imitating art too well
and i’m ******* ****** at whoever told me that
i could be whatever i wanted when i grow up
because they were ******* lying.

so i tell you that at my funeral
i want everyone to get really ******* drunk.
and you tell me that jesus christ, daniela,
most people don’t spend their free time
thinking about their own funeral.
and it’s a matter of perspective, i guess.
some people never see the meteor coming
and some people can never tear their eyes away.
death is always walking towards me, the bus is always coming,
it’s just that sometimes it sort of speeds up
and everything else slows down.
so at my funeral, i want there to be an open bar
and i want to have someone collecting
other people’s stories about me at the door as admission.
i am not obsessed with my legacy,
just my end result.
i have never known where i’m going to end up
but i’ve always been willing to find out.

and at my funeral i want everyone to dance.
sloppy and uncoordinated.
i don’t want my funeral to be sad.
i can’t think of anything
less fitting.

A square is the earth.
A circle,
the heavens above,
the spinning stars.

That which is wide
yet bounded on all sides
is home.
It is that which sustains us.

The earth.
The earth is beautiful oh!
Do come and see!

I thought you were beautiful

Not shallow beauty,
Skin deep
The kind of beautiful like the sun
Shining on a tree leaf
Showing its veins

Beautiful like,
The sound of a creek
After a good storm

Like the feel of a summer breeze
On the back of my neck

I held you in awe

You were the mist,
Rising off the lake on a cool morning
The view from the top of my mountain,
In the fall when the leaves are colored

You were the violin music
Playing softly while I danced
The colors oil makes on the street
Just after it rains and the light hits it

I was nothing
A ghost,
In the darkest corridors of your haunted house
The typo on an old type writer,
Needing white out

I thought you were beautiful