Here in America, number who knows what in education,
Where we excel in standardization,
Of souls and resumes
Where you need a 4.5 gpa
And hey, I know I’m one of the ones in the 1%
I’ll repent for my hypocrisy in saying “break free”
I know, poor me, being reduced to numbers just isn’t my thing
4.33, schedule block B, math, PE and chemistry
Sometimes it’s hard to breathe
I can feel my chest cave and shrink
That chewing glass feeling
And imagine the kids sitting on the brink of failure
Which has grown to become something:
A cacophony of the anti American dream
And therefore we’re stripped of autonomy
In the land of the free
“I pledge Allegiance to”
The US public education system which finds its niche in the fact
That witchcraft seems to be the way to survive it
Deviation from the norm is only embraced for a profit
So basically unless you’re an actual prophet I’d color in the lines
It’s not like you could find the time
After the 7 hours of school, 3 for homework, 2 for sports, 7 for sleep, 2 for eating, and half a minute for breathing
So on Gregory, on Denise, to your 9 to 5s
Of course there’s those that thrive
Living their best life outside the American Assembly line, like in algebra there’s an exception to every rule
So I’ll run the rat race September to December to spring break to summer and then start it over
I’ll chew my glass, if you’ll fill one up with champagne for June of 2020, when the real world begins,
Because the world of high school and imaginary is where I live.

Welcome to the generation of revolution,
Millions and counting, in a few years you’ll be counting on us.
While some of us still use a pass for the bathroom, we’ve been programmed
Much like the devices you tie us to,
To look forward.
The skills you instilled for GPAs and resumes have made us unafraid to say
That something needs to be done, and from that you run away
If we don’t agree we’re immature, uninformed, need to be kept quiet more.
You say we’ve become slaves to the almighty “I”
But we scourge for information
Because we’ve seen a tweet change lives
We’ve seen a hashtag bring millions into the fight,
Artists, victims, protests blow up overnight
We are the first generation with the world at our fingers in such a real way,
Here we are, standing stronger than you’ve seen us,
These kids; you cloth, shelter and feed us,
Just to call us lazy and insane for using the very brains that you instilled,
The “common core” you used, because you didn’t want to build a generation of robots,
Fear not, guess what, you didn’t.

I am a necromancer, the skeletons in your closet work for me.
Fear naught, I'm just the doctor arrived too late,
it's not as if you could escape,
Your secrets, I see them, the dead do tell tales.
Don't lie, for those laying under six feet of dirt have given all the dirt on you.
Regardless, there's no one who can slip my grasp, I'm the woman who can grab you back from Death's own icy hands.
Fear naught, for an army of the dead has little ambition,
they simply seek manumission foryour god.
Those who seek my refuge need to be...adequate, at best.

I am a necromancer, don't hurry, I've got all the time in this world...
and the next.

I find it funny that the boy who bandaged my battered self,
sat me on a bench with razor blade rakes on my hips and heart, could be so hypocritical.
He told me I was silly, selfish to think these things and act according to impatience and impulse
And now he “needs” the needles and swears by the smoke that fills the space between us and ** I’m scared he’s headed for a place that not even I’ve been.
The end.
You always think you’ve found it, and then another minute passes
And another,
And then you realize that everything is infinite and inescapable.
Terrifying and terribly reassuring, all at once.

It's a straight and narrow path, well defined,
yours was content next to mine.
Hers to the right, his to the left, the intersections a veritable mess.
When you treat me, be kind, I know I've crossed over my lines and into yours, but southern hospitality is what you're known for.
Pour me a drink, kind stranger, this is stranger than anything I've known before.
And I'm a guest, I get it, but I doubt you can get me out of your head.
I'm enjoying the tour though, my friend.
I'm from the straight laced, early morning-late night, stick up your ***, uptight class of those with grand plans of Ivy leagues and shaking hands with presidents and world class scholars,
and you from a more relaxed, kicked back, slow motion, 2.0 kind of world, surprising we get on so well.
It's probably the wee bit of **** in between us, because normally, the way you speak would have gotten you knocked on your ***,
instead I laughed.
So when our paths cross again, both a little wider, more winding,
remind me of the time we had and please, do come again,
Priss and *****, Mench and shmuck, thanks for hosting such a cliche new friend.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, if you say sorry enough they’ll believe it, know you mean it.
I think your heart could use that kind of break.
right now it’s breaking.
For some small comfort there’s the night, the silky smooth night, the moon and stars.
For the hopeless romantic and pragmatist- for we’re but a second in eternity, a speck in infinity
But what a privilege it is to be so.
And what a burden it is to be so.
To be so….what?
Because here, for the first time in a long time it’s not my poison.
It’s his and hers and theirs.
Regardless, I’ll drink to my place in forever and infinity, and in regards to how my throat burns holes in my heart as it goes down, I’ll make do as I’ve done before.
Down is where it mixes with the roots,
With the ashes from which this sort of deep pain burns in the embers of my own broken glass
That’s right, I’m filled to the brim with bottles of what used to be stale beer, scorched purple in the sun of some far off desert.
They’ve been lathered in hope, rinsed with cynicism, dried with the same snot ridden shirt sleeve that dried my tears.
From them, I’ll drink poison until their pain is gone and my wish washy smile resurfaces, blood in my teeth from a war not mine.
When the straight laced meets the twisted, who bends and which way?
For better or worse, or shall I stay here in the numb, sweet and cool embrace of neutrality?
No, because I seek warmth.
It gets more than warm, hot enough to bend steely figures into what seems human.
Don’t touch. Too hot.
Proximity is a dangerous game here, where you risk skin and bone bubbling, dripping into the fire.
Burns leave scars, did you know that?
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
Contradicting, questioning, quizzically,
I’m making my way through this like a blind man through a labyrinth of the social species.
Say maybe, so you don’t land in concrete, before you freeze from waist down and can’t breathe.
Say maybe, so time moves quickly; or stay here and bear their moment, heart and soul rough and bare.
Say maybe, so you don’t have to be sure you’re forgiven.
Say maybe, keep on holding their sins so the weight can pull you away from your own.

Most People are made in prose.
A character develops over time Personality, passion, between the lines Flesh paper thin, with inked in eyes.
A person is like a journal.
Pages fill through out their lives, Towards the end, with weakened spines The story unfolds, by and by.
Mainly unremarkable, weary, tired.
The language flows and blows Right beyond every
Thought ever thunk
Or fact ever known
And I think I've thunk a few million times I want to run my hand down your spine... The book of course
I want to read until my voice is hoarse
I want to fill in the missing lines
Stare somewhere onto your inked in smile
Because I believe the author filling you up sees you like I do Like I want you to.
They see your messy hair
Messy room
Messy heart
If I were to pick the words apart
Your prose would be words of creators pride They wrote you somewhere deep and divine
Maybe you were made of poetry
That's how you float so far above me
You were depicted, descripted
From words far better than I or average
Words that leave a taste in your mouth
That you never want to wash out
I think you'd taste like cherries and-
The words I mean
They make you out to be something worth being
I know I like what I'm seeing-
I mean reading!
Even the writing is oh so tantalizing.
The way you dot your I's
I mean come on, no fair
Structurally no one can compare...
To the way youre written I mean!
This is all nothing but a metaphor, of course.
If you looked beyond my inked in eyes
You'd see just why i choose trying to hide behind it I'm cherry pits and uncrossed T's
Someone like you just can't see me
I'm prose, plainly spoken, spine humbly broken. Well worn, no classic, nothing fantastic.
.

But you, you make me speak
In words smooth and sleek
Like singing they slip, drip, sneak Across my lips
Pure bliss
Because you're letting me write you
I think that's what I'm meant to do. You're the one and only made of poetry.

Somewhere along the way, I've close to abandoned what of me that used to see a tree and climb it,
get hurt and survive it,
and so somewhere along the way I shrank.
Into myself I fold like paper, delicate like the fortune tellers made on the playground.
Smoke goes in my lungs, and dust comes out.
I used to spit flowers and now I spit fire.
Parts of me are vapor, run your hand through me to change my shape.
I sit, diminish, deflate, and deconstruct until I'm naught but nothing.
Air maybe? To fuel the fire?
Or water to put it out? Is it better to let the ash fly free, let that be my legacy?
Let me grow and let me be.
I'm withering, unfortunately, be back soon maybe?

If I'm itching inside my own skin,
If there's a bit of wild carrying on in,
around,
or perhaps behind
perhaps over, around, somewhere besides my eyes,
If I seem unseemingly unladylike today,
I'm sorry.
Scatterbrained? Surely, certainly, you've noticed.
If you know me, you know this.
I carry on, convincingly
all the while my mind careens away.
Dangerously, it careens away.
Away, attacking the menacingly mundane,
away to a place much more pleasant.
Plesently, myriad of melodrama unfold.
I tell myself stories untold.
I'm so sorry I'm scatterbrained, darling.
I do know.

Demonize me, idolize and memorialize me.
Act like you’ve memorized me.
Cross your heart and hope to die.
Romanticize me, analyze and angelizise me.
Do anything but rationalize that I’m nothing but human, no better or worse.
Demean me, curse me out, be mean to me.
The same goes for you, I’m not pure saint or pure sin, you cared where I’d been and who’d I’d touched,
Nosy much?
I used to idolize, memorialize and romanticize your every move,
But then something moved,
Unblocked the sun and moon,
And soon I saw less and less of you.

You aren’t afriad of the dark.
You’re afraid of what you can’t see
Can’t hear
Can’t know.
You shine a light into the darkness and see only shawdows,
It casts claws
Casts fangs,
Casts horror onto what we can’t see.
Because there are no monsters in the dark,
Just the absence of light,
And light is where the true monsters reside.
You can’t see blood behind the Bible,
The labels,
The money, just like skin over vein
Monsters rely on us squinting against the sun,  
Against their insults, and always their restrictions
Those that make us sing requiem for life and for living
#new
So don’t shed light, and let compassion light the way.
Don’t blind figures in the dark and don’t be blinded by the sun.
After all, the boy who cried wolf whispered
“I am”

There's a moment,
some once, not someone
It rests between a before and an after,
Between a then and a now.

I'm sitting.
I'm sitting, and the sun is shining onto my dashboard.
I'm sitting and I'm getting sweaty because there you are,
quite simply sitting next to me and the world seems to be closing in.
Quite presently, in fact.

Quite presently, as well, I'm quite afraid I may close to lose my mind
and my marbles,
and my willpower.
I'm quite afraid of quite a lot, I'm quite afraid.

At this moment, when this moment was the here and the now,
the one you're supposedly supposed to live in,
I would have died and gone to heaven just to hold your hand.
Just touch me, please just touch me.

Instead, in an Olympic Feat
I reach across the center console.
"Act before you have time to think," you think.
I kissed you.

I find it funny that the boy who bandaged my battered self,
sat me on a bench with razor blade rakes on my hips and heart, could be so hypocritical.
He told me I was silly, selfish to think these things and act according to impatience and impulse
And now he “needs” the needles and swears by the smoke that fills the space between us and **** I’m scared he’s headed for a place that not even I’ve been.
The end.
You always think you’ve found it, and then another minute passes
And another,
And then you realize that everything is infinite and inescapable.
Terrifying and terribly reassuring, all at once.

It’s occured to me that under the fast food wrappers, my car smells like coconuts, it pulls to the right, and far more people have been inside than I have friends.
The first of my class to turn 16, I made them quickly.
Under the sweatshirts from days not well planned weather-wise and stray socks, my car smells like driving 80 in a 40, a boy band on the radio, and looks like all 100, 000 of the miles on it.
Under the sticky notes and cheap sunglasses from summers I spent somewhere my mother didn’t know I was, my car smells like *****, a bottle under the seat, leaking slightly, my headache the next day was more a give away regardless.
Under the mess of a hunk of metal I babied until the AC roared and the key had to be wiggled and the heat only worked on one side, my carb smells like 16 and 17 and 18 and 19; its a forever sort of smell you can’t describe but immediately place.
A cacophony of the places I’ve been.

Thee, I compare to a literal witch,
In more modern terms I should call you a-
Person whom I love for your stinging wit.
Intolerable you are, they may say,
Insults with which you make my day, so quick;
As long as they’re not directed MY way.
Beauty, not face, but sarcasm thick,
Not liked, but easy it is that you lay,
Yourself, you are, lest you’re called a *****,
My outspoken love remember, I say
In twenty years you’ll be getting YOUR kicks,
Boys will be boys, and hell they may pay.
Idiots they are and so they shall stay,
Catch wind of your wrath, to god they should pray.

There's a nasty impermanence in the air,
with the cold.
As I see my breath, I see what's next.
A soldiering on of the highest degree,
In pursuit of something that seems to be necessary.
A trudging on of tired feet, we meet in corridors for a minute
A minute of infinity.
Suddenly it seems, infinity has shrunk,
Not unlike Alice.
Our Prison turns to Palace,
We make promises, more minutes to come,
and then the best of us are up and gone.
Diaspora of the minds,
bodies,
souls,
People we can say we've always known.
The next moment is cherished,
the next few are farther between,
and next you know,
lines appear in faces once smooth,
until the faces come forth again, but different.