I don’t accept your hand-me-down home.
Your smell has seeped into the fabrics
of the world I’m trying to fit in to
and it’s choking me.
The streets are laced with your memories,
and your footprints are too fat to fill.
I am buckling under the weight
of the expectations that
I cannot measure up to.

.1. Your eyes glimmer and beam when you talk about something you're passionate in. The rest of the world needs to view that beauty your voice speaks when the potential flows out of your mouth like tiny ballet dancers frolicking over your lips. Those lips touch together every time you say 'M' and now you're trying to see if you can say it without closing your lips. The curiosity of a young toddler trapped inside your body that must be discovered so before that happens, you will stay alive.

2. Your feet spring around from time to time because you're either excited or anxious; or both. The ground has savored every single moment your feet taps its skin, the cracks in the pavements have relished the instant your feet stumble against the stone pelt. Even so, just the movement of your body in contact with its exterior is appreciated.

3. Your hair bounces when you bob your head to music. Those perfect waves and curls, those bangs that hide your delicate face understands your sadness; why you're listening to that song or that rage and anger that persuades you to yell and cry. It's just a moment and you will get through it.

4. Your hands, as they write rhymes and comments and stories and virtues about life. Your radiant but soft complexion reflects the silence you have brought upon yourself. Your voice tells you to pipe up but nothing comes out. Promise yourself that you will not suffer in silence but paradise in flamboyant noise.

5. Your stomach that metabolizes; constantly at work to process the fuel that keeps you alive. The same stomach that plays perfect outside but loosens inside. The one perfect enough as you are, but displays your decisions.

6. Your arms lift you up each and every day.
7. Your waist who reminds you that you are perfect and worth it.
8. Your knees, elbows, and wrists that help you move; leaving you in pain or lively motion; or in relaxed gestures.

9. Your heart; your heart is on fire and you would need not one, but two buckets of water to even try extinguishing it. Burning with eagerness and love, no hate settling within. That heart, that keeps pumping and pumping, never allowing you to weaken and perish.

10. Your body; that does everything it possibly can to keep you alive.

i. the curly, green-haired
leo with the cry-baby tattoo
on her left calf; fish net stockings and
loud guitar playing and
menthol cigarettes. driving through
the park at 9 pm, ***** shots,
the white house with the a-frame roof,
hugs that made your heart feel as warm
as she did

crying as i left my room again to be
intertwined with a girl who did not love me, but i wanted to;
months pass, lonely car rides with
one-sided conversations and
seven years gone,
quiet disconnection
that made you feel as cold
as i did

ii. brown eyes, brown skin,
round glasses and chicago streetlights.
holding each other close on the subway
lakehouse parties in the beginning of spring and
pisces season and tarot readings and
soft kisses on the train.
holding hands at the aquarium,
sweet poetry and calm and
a sense of oneness that made you feel
important

hurt for the third time
a panic, a loss
i held their heart in my hands and
let it fall
harsh
unimportant
i still carry the guilt on my fingertips

iii. short hair. freckled cheeks, i
fell in love with the way the skin
crinkled around her eyes when she smiled.
an apartment, a home built
around our lips touching
wrapped in blankets on the couch,
dense smoke and her hand on my leg while she
drove. chinese food and
waking up against her chest and
laughing so hard
my ribs hurt

crashing. her anger withering away my
heartstrings; pain and
crying alone in the bathtub
moving away
drunk tears on the interstate
punching my thighs
in place of the way her
words made
me hurt

This is the color of my walls at eight am
a little light a little dark a little I don’t know if I want to try yet.
“Just say they’re yellow,” I am told.
Secretly, I think they doubt that too, that sometimes they wake up and see the not-yellow.

This is the color of my walls at midnight
a mess of thoughts, making a Gogh at it. I think maybe there’s a little red mixed in sometimes.
“They’re not red,” I am told, again.
How could they know, do they watch my walls at night? I wouldn’t mind the company.

This is the color of my walls at eleven am
a cave I wish I’d never tried to leave at eight am, a cave of moss and wood and rivers.
“No plants grow, no waters flow in there,” I am told.
I can’t hear them, because I am in a cave and the water is rushing too loudly.

This is the color of my walls at three thirty pm
just a little bit like sleeping, more like a cocoon, nothing at all like leaving.
“The walls are dead,” I am told.
But maybe they just wish they were, so they wouldn’t have to listen to their colours.

This is the color of my walls at this time
maybe pulling, maybe pushing. I think that one is yawning, that one sighing
“Don’t listen to the things walls say,” I am told.
Aha, so they HAVE heard them too. My walls make them miss the colors of their walls. Aha.