Ten years old again,
In a tree ten feet high again,
In scuffed shorts with tangled hair,
And with the boys I longed to be.

Sanctimonious girls in dresses and frills,
Boredom and constraint personified,
Stare up in incredulity
As I heave myself over mossy branches.

“Girls don’t climb trees.”
I do. I roll in mud, play racing games,
Never brush my hair.
“You’d be pretty if only you tried.”

You’d feel alive if only you tried.
The wind on my bare arms,
Dirt beneath fingernails,
Scrapes on my shins
Red and out of place
Like smudged lipstick
On children’s faces.

I’m not you. I’m me.
Boxes serve to keep us in,
Deliver us neatly packaged
To a society which cannot cope
With fluidity,
Individuality,
Uncertainty.
Boo!

She says those two misguided words:
“Make over”.
Impossible. One cannot start afresh.
This is the result of every waking moment,
Of every word heard and spoken,
Each memory joyous and painful,
A piece of art nineteen years in the making.
Not to be destroyed in one act of disguise.

Yet curiosity is my mistress.
She leads me to boundaries
I never knew existed.
Up goliath trees,
Into foreign beds,
To the brink of reality
In mind-bending worlds
Of parallels.

Like a mannequin, devoid of identity
I give my image to you
And you place yours jarringly
Onto my reticent body.

The obliging cheers
At my transformation
Into an eloquent femininity
Feel hollow and worthless.
I have done nothing of merit.

I totter like a toddler
Uncomfortable in my own skin.
I’m on stage, an act,
A project. Not a person.

How bizarre it feels
To wear a stranger’s façade
Of dresses and frills,
When you know you belong
To a different world
Of dirt, and treetops,
And freedom.

My mind is racing again
At 4:37 am
I wish my grades were as heightened
As my inability to sleep

I’ve been having nightmares
But they don’t scare me anymore
Sometimes
I find a comfort in knowing
That the monsters I’ve dreamt
Are a lot more pleasant than the monsters
I have left to dream

I don’t mind it
But I mind you
Only because you’re always on my
Mind

I pretend that I’m a solipsist ,
But I could have just made it up
Your love wasn't as real in my heart
(As it was in my head)

I am a shy little flower
Somewhere behind the trees
“There’s really no way to reach me”
But there is.
No one has taken the time to
Explore

I once met a girl
A traveler in that moment
She told me a story about her grandmother
Who was shipped to a boarding school in Germany right after WWII.
At the age of three
The first sentence she ever understood was:

"Everything is broken"

And she lived a whole life
With that silly little thought
Echoing.

Someday
I will find an ocean breeze
Worth calling my home
With sand as soft
As my tinder
Beating heart

Good night
Is a formulation of words
Whose meaning I am still
Unfamiliar with

As I walked along
Your art stricken walls
I wonder if I’ve ever really been capable
Of creating

But hardly ever do I strike an inspiration
I can call entirely my own

I see it happening in all of the jumps and laughter of the little one,

He has been wronged by so many people and he can’t spell yet,

I can already see the anger and tears in his eyes beneath the smiles and warmth that lies alongside his innocence,

He’s finding outlets that society will judge and he’s already ignoring them when no one’s looking in pursuit to be himself to find heroes in this world who understand and won’t yell and judge,

He feels safe and home and in peace with the surroundings that bore him it is new,

So infatuated with subtleties that he unbeknownst to himself find solitude in joy,

The kid is outrageously confused, figuring things out that I hadn’t till the latter years and it is confusing,

It’s as if you know the future of the child already despite the choices and personality of the frail soul,

You know him in and out and the kid just wants to be a kid, have fun, and surrender to happiness and safety and home,

Well home is mobile, always on the move, home is fatherless with mother selling dope, home is little torturous yells that don’t ring with I Love Yous anymore, home is torn into pieces of I don’t cares, grow ups, and be a man,

Well if you should ever find yourself so unprotected, so delirious in thought that it pains in your gut and you can’t scream out with so much intensity as to bust a balloon with red, then say ok and move on. Say okay and move on,

Repeat the torture only in your head because you don’t have the right to live in abuse, you don’t have the right to be afraid, you don’t have the right to be misunderstood, you don’t have the right to cry yourself to sleep, but it’s okay not to be okay.