"Isn't it incredible,"
She queried,
"There's an addicting collection of lifestyles before us...
And we can be any of them!"

"Marissa, you genius,"
Said I,
"You brilliant, amazing, genius!"
She had articulated perfectly the way I felt about the world in front of us.

There were the usual crowds--
The jocks,
The nerds,
The theatre kids,
The band geeks,
The stoners,
The gamers,
The popular chicks,
The emos,
Et cetera, et cetera.

All with their own quirks,
Their idiosyncrasies,
Their peccadilloes,
Warts and shines.

There were other kinds of crowds, too,
Though.

There was the girl with thin scars on her thin wrists,
A part of the lonely crowd that grappled with a common demon.

The boy who wore the same sweatshirt every day,
Who'd recently begin to sport some peach fuzz above his upper lip,
Who often smelled of body odor and whose hair was a little too greasy.
The one who was a member of the horde of quiet poor--
Smart enough to fool you,
But not wealthy enough to keep up.

The student who slept through class,
Part of the group for whom school offered an escape from the wars at home.
A small island of relative peace amidst a sea of turbulent battles.

There were the busy bees,
With their AP classes and extracurriculars,
Not popular but not ostracized, either.

There were the ones who flitted between,
The social butterflies who somehow maintained the graces of all the above,
Few and far between,
But easy to talk to and unassuming,
The kind of people everyone likes.

There were the bullies, too.
The ones insecure in themselves,
Feasting on,
Reveling in,
Dependent upon,
The weaknesses of others.

All these and so many more.

We saw them all--

A brilliant camouflage of people and personalities and habits of life,
Some by choice,
Others not.

And like Plath's fig tree,
Which we'd read about in English class last week,
They all seemed so appealing,
In some way or another.

Maybe I wanted their smarts,
Or their popularity,
Or their anonymity,
Or their struggles,
Or their personality,
Or their strength,
Or their courage..

I didn't really know.

But I did know that,
Like the fig tree,
I would choose one,
And the others would die off,
Forgotten.

But for now,
There they were,
An enticing dinner menu with altogether too many options.

And here we stood,
In the hallowed halls of high school,
The world ours for the taking,

And such an addicting collection of lifestyles in front of us.

light rain on these shaking hands,
shower the earth below,
ease the darkness of our heartland
repose—if only to forgo.

My mother is a piano
A little out of tune
Dusty keys
That play with ease
Ivory as the moon

Sometimes I’ll touch the wood
And admire its antiquity
Think of all the things that it
Ever dreamed to be

Sometimes when my fingers
Fly through a song
I wonder how this piano
Ever got so strong.

My mother is a piano,
She makes music out of air,
She answers each finger
With an embrace, with care

Her legs planted firmly
in the ground
How much I love to hear
her deep, rich sound.

The music man had
Sung the same tune
Strummed the same guitar
Since he was eleven years old.

The hurried shoes changed
The rusted coins clanged
Still day after day, he played

He was once young and bright
Radiating musical light
But still, no one stopped to listen

Through the seasons and years
He played for deaf ears
And wondered if he was a ghost

He got old and gray
His clothes starting to fray
Age had darkened his glisten

Like an aging tree he bent
As the people came and went
And still, no one stopped to listen

His heart stopped beating in his sleep
As he was lying on the cold, dark street

And still, no one stopped to listen

When the music man arrived
Tears fell from the skies
As a room full of people
Sang his song.

We change and we fall,
We change when it’s fall, brown, red
Crumpled and stepped on.

Tree roots and brown boots,
Gum stamped onto the cement…
The view from below.