After a good shower
Everything seems better
There's just something about
Being clean and hair that's weter

This is for the cell phone renegades
Those who use post its like grenades

This is for the average mavericks
Those who live in defiance of cruel cliques

This is for the subway gladiators
Those who live love over hate even in an elevator

This is for the commuter warriors
Those who ignore the bigots and barriers

To all of you out there , wherever you are
Let's create a better world, both near and far

According to this book
You can't throw knives as a Girl Scout individual
However, the book neglects to mention
Uranium, cadavers, and cult rituals

Harken now to the fighter's call
From demigod warriors to the petitioners at the mall
We band together and rise when they divide and fall
E Pluribus, Unum: we rise above it all

When my mom starts shouting at everyone
When my dad disagrees with something I secretly like
When my sister calls me a ***** (I  can be a real **** to her sometimes)
Music is my closest family member

When I haven't seen my friends for two weeks
When all I my texts go unanswered
When I say I'm a homebody because I can't find anyone to hang with
Music is my best friend

When Trump and Brexit happen in the same year
When terrorism appears in the news again
When teen suicide deaths exceed teen car accident deaths
Music is my comfort

There's one way to warm hearts
On the day of an election:
Stickers with sarcastic remarks
Paired with cute confections

Do you even see me as an equal human being?
Do you care about who I am, where I've been?
Can you hear what I've heard and see what I'm seeing?
Can you try to understand that what I say has meaning?

Now it is finally the moment I truth
As citizens enter the voting booth
In response, I'd just like to quote a comic based on this election here:
"Vote like youyou'll have to explain yourself in twenty years"

"Nothing you could tell me would ever disappoint me."
From the things I've heard you say, I can name at least three

I'm okay at cooking
But I'm no Julia Child
So hopefully dinner tonight
Won't end up getting too wild

Their verses are like
Exotic bird songs in a
Jungle of humans

Some call their words crass
But the way I see it, they
Are flamboyant calls

Just as the blue jay
Has mating and defense calls
So do us humans

We are the ones who
Engineered golden rice for
Those who needed food

We are the ones who
Are starting to plan trips to
The iron planet

We are the ones who
Make earthquake proof matresses,
Buildings, and cities

We are the ones who
Are stopping malaria
With DNA's help

We are the ones who
Are actually learning
About mental health

We are the ones who
Saw racism and started
Black lives matter groups

We are the ones who
Push for equal treatments of
All ****** types

We are the ones who
Spread news from the source with just
A phone and a cause

We are the ones who
Are making changes, my friends
We are the future

Halloween has come and gone
The spirits danced, scared, and then moved on
And without the protective spells from all the wands
We begin to hear the christmas songs

I looked at my planner
To see my schedule in a glimpse
On election day, a month old note read
"Cookie sales and a possible apocalypse"

Tonight all the spirits come out and dance
Tonight all the beasts jump around and prance
Tonight we join that ancient Celtic trance
From Japan to America to Johannesburg to France

The spirits and fairies walk the earth tonight
As we watch and tell stories to induce fright
As werewolves and zombies come out into the light
And all of the witches shall do as they might

So happy Hallows eve, wherever you are
Be it in a haunted hedge or a ship in the stars
From the days of the first druids to those of flying cars
Let us all, human or not, come out to laugh, sing, and roar

She marched forward
In her feline gait
Four ears laid back
Wings slightly unfurling
Tail curling and relaxing like a wave
As she shone beneath the moonlight and cameras
Dark skin and white curls making her seem like a star in her own right
Like those reflected in her sterling pupils

And, before the crowd
Of militaresi and the police
She raised her head to the skies
And sung in the manner
That a wolf howls
Or a jay chirps:
Without cessation
Letting her spirit out
Moving as the song dictated
Not giving a **** that she
(Given that she lyricized for two hours)
Looked like a madwoman
As she sung
About love and heartbreak
About loyalty and betrayal
About friends and enemies
Nature and nurture
Justice and crime
Monsters and men

She sung with no era
No race
No species
No planet
She sung as a person
Dangerously close to the edge
The same place she had been all of her life

And when she stopped
The universe was dead silent
With awe and confusion
As she slipped into the sea
Of a slave revolt

What I say is that
I don't need friends because I'm
An introvert girl

And that's mostly true
But in all honesty, I'd
Like some companions

The full truth is that
I don't need friends who will joke
About mental health

I don't need friends who
Use "******" and "******" as
As ******* nicknames

I don't need friends who
Create drama and then say
That they hate it all

I don't need friends who
Will lie to me, and then go
Gossip about me

I don't need a circle
Of friends that gets so complex
It becomes a web

And to be honest
I've been, in the past, guilty
Of all of these things

But I don't need to
Deal with these things all the time
In a group of friends

I just want friends who
I can simultaneously
Be dumb and smart with

Friends whom I can be
Existential with, and yet
Prank other kids with

Friends whom I don't feel
The constant need to hide or
Be perfect around

Unfortunately
Those kinds of friends seem to be
In short supply here

So far I have three
And I only really see
Them three times a month

Call me a homebody
Say I'm antisocial, but
That's just how I feel

Why has the word "trigger" become such a joke
Why do you giggle about it with your blokes
Why is it that you joke about it thoughtlessly
Frightening those affected away from the help they need

My feelings are these weird little creatures
That can make me want to hide
I sure as hell can't show them to others
So I keep them hidden inside
Except for around a precious few:
My two besties and the poems at my bedside
They are the ones whom I'm comfortable with
And whom I don't feel the need to abide

If I can't dance, I don't want to be
A part of your revolution
And if I can't laugh in heaven
I don't want to be in God's nation
Our favorite quotes show more about us
Than they do the people who wrote them
And if you want to see a change in the world
Become that change, then

It's time for a tale of my school's counseling system
And how it effects the students within
So to all of the counselors who ask "why don't they come to us?":
Here are the stories we take to the bus

First of all, it happens that you're never in
And without you there, how will they talking begin?
We get that you're also the hall monitors
But the way things are, you won't even let us be heard

And honestly, don't even get me started
On the stories students had once they departed

I had a friend, C, who's a bisexual girl
And, of course, that yields problems in this world
In middle school she dated another girl
In the "oh my gosh, we're holding hands" sense of the word
And one day, when it became all too much
C told her counselor about the dating and such
A day later, C and her bae were called in
And, I should note here, bae's parents saw the rainbow as sin
Turns out the counselor had told both their parents
That their girls were dating, despite the problems apparent
After that C never saw bae again
And that is how counselors treated my friend

My bestie, S, had many problems at home
She would avoid being stabbed by running outside into the snow
So one day she went to talk mental health
But her counselor gave her something else
When S, a philosophical joker, mused the meaning of life
The counselor told her it wasn't worth the strife
The woman told her that she had not place on this earth
And general statements that were all rather dearth
And S thought as she walked out an away
"What if somebody suicidal walked in today?
At least that's not any kind of issue for me."
And that's how our counselors treated my bestie

The final anecdote is a bit personal:
I'm the girl who did this, after all
Things had been getting more tense at my house
My mom's shouting outbursts made me want to vanish like a mouse
Even on a vacation to Virginia Beach
These problems always happened to be within reach
And afterward my mom would try to make things smooth
But her words only made me more and more confused
So I went to Mr. R after months of stressing
Hoping I could find solutions to a problem that was pressing
He told me I should be honest with my mother:
That I should tell her I saw as terrifying what she saw as a bother
So I did just that in the late afternoon
Wishing it to work, but not raising my hopes so soon
And of course my words fell on deaf ears
My mom told me I was irrational for my fears
And later still, in future nights and future fights
My mom had a new verbal weapon: yelling at me for my fright
Saying "don't you cry, I'm not hitting you"
It took me the rest of the year to figure out what I could do

But there is one thing that I hold dear
Given to me by my counsellors here
For if my counselor hadn't said that to me
You wouldn't be reading the poems you see
My way of dealing with my problems was verse
At first in note margins, than this site on the virtual universe

So to all you counselors who asked why students never come to you:
We've found other places to do what we need to

Oh, my ******* puppy
Your tail moves faster than a guppy
And you put up with things we do
Like when we try to bathe you
We got you quite some years ago
And wow, you really did grow
And I love you, you hyper furball
Shedding, barking, annoyance and all

How can I believe you'll take me seriously
When you joke that you'll sneak ****** into my coffee

How can I believe you'll listen to my pitch
When you, arguing with my sister, call her a *****

How can I believe all these compliments you say
When wether or not you'll shout at me depends on the day

Whatever it is that you choose
The only one who can is you

Whatever that something might be
Just make sure to think it through

And no mater what the outcome is
Don't let others tell you what to do

Give a man a room
With a bed and an endless kitchen
And a door and a window
And he will live in the room
He may go outside often
But he will always come back
And maybe
In time
He'll bring back new things
And he'll add to the room

Take away the door
And he might stay in for months
Before he can't take it anymore
And climbs out the window
Never to return

Take away
The window and then door
And the man
Failing to break through the walls
Will either
Tear up the room with graffiti and flames
Or
Resign himself to a corner for weeks

Either way, he will destroy himself
If he has not way out

So it only makes sense
To give the man
A windows and a door
And to have a little faith in him
As he meets the world

There are many ways
One can become a zombie
There's viruses, being bitten
And then there's taking the PSAT

They started off
As nothing more
Than interstellar dust

And then they pulled together
And shone bright in the void

Then they burst
Into a fiery nebula
Of multielemental radiation and dust

And over and over again
They were made and unmade
Beautiful galaxies shining endlessly
In that silent vacuum

And they formed solarities
And became little blobs of magma and gas
And they spun around
Crashing and breaking
Merging and making

Until one day they cooled
And all was calm over the muddy, uniform
Three foot deep sulfuric waves

And one day
They became a red film
But this time
Instead of being made or unmade
They made and unmade themselves

And as they made themselves again
They missed a thread in the genes
And they changed

And over and over
They made these mistakes
But each error they learned from
Each wrong step made them stronger
Each bad guess made them smarter
Each wrong look made them more beautiful

And so they grew
From a film to a blob
From green string to trunks
From swimming rays to Jurassic terrors
From frightened mice
To graceful, awkward, weird-looking, insane, and genius apes

And the time between changes
Kept getting shorter
First coordinated sounds
Then scratched in clay
Then limestone mountains
And one day
They looked around
And realized they had the planet

And as the billenia of the galaxies
Lapsed into the millions of life
Lapsed into the millennia of the young apes
Lapsed into the centuries of the modern species
Will lapse even further

And they looked all around
And they saw this change

And they imagine
And discover
And create
And live

And one day
They will make for themselves
A pair of metal wings
And a tail of pure energy

And they will fly up
And dance amongst the stars

We danced around in the stardust
With only a vacuum and photons between us

And as the queen began to form
It was then our land was born

And as she grew in power and energy
We found in asteroids a land of plenty

When we formed we were together
And it seemed as though the heat lasted forever

And then one day our brother came
And split apart what was the same

But our story did not end quite there
With magma scattering everywhere

When we came to we had reformed
Into two people we were born

And though at first it was quite strange
We came to love this sudden change

In the beginning, we were warm and bright
Our closeness yielded three hour nights

And as we cooled, we began to see
The differences developing in you and me

For as we slowed and grew apart
We became our own kinds of art

Your reddish film multiplied and changed
Into beasts and plants both wonderful and strange

I turned silver, with vast empty seas
Pure shining silver as far as one can see

And though we've slowed and now dance at arms length
We observe each other's beauty and give each other strength

For it is I and I alone who pulls at your tides
And incites those graceful apes to the madness each one hides

And you alone see the silver I reflect
With your green and blue body so fluid and perfect

And though our brother's push will one day throw us apart
I have your sweet carbon scent, and you my full silver art

I think a brick wall would show my feelings towards you
Talking's no use, and fighting isn't, too
And I've tried over, around, under, and through
And now I've stopped talking, because what else I can do

The pumpkin moon rises high in the sky
As I start humming Tim Burton lullabies
The air is crisp and cool and clear
Though not as crisp as the leaves I hear
The scents of smoke, apple, and misty dawns
Mingle as I walk past leaf covered lawns
Walking a black hound, as night comes from day
I walk around, glad that fall's here to stay

The question seems to lie in

Wether we are
We are the physical computer drive
Or the transferable background programs

Wether we are
Tied together in networks or an internet
Or wether we are a lone, disconnected monitor

Wether this place
Was created intentionally by an experimenting programmer
Or wether it is just a bug, a byproduct of natural binary

And if we
Have the computing power and memory storage to download the truth
Or if we'd simply overheat our circuitry

Let me submit some thoughts to the public:

If one novel can
Overturn your worldview, then
Maybe the view's wrong

If one poem can
Make you turn to suicide
Then you're not happy

If a few berries
Can overthrow your empire
Then it's bound to fall

If one whistleblower
Can discredit you, then your
Actions might be wrong

If one blogger can
Threaten your morals, then the
Morals are too strict

If one flaw can break
The entire system, it's
already broken

That's all.

I walk along this street again
Chatting up a lone fireman
I tell the psychiatrist I'm just fine
As I taste rainwater like wine
And somehow it's a crime to go walking
Somehow we're strange for talking
I wish people would take me seriously
Instead of reducing me to an unbalanced teen
And maybe if they questioned just for a second
They'd see why Poe and Dickens beckon
So what if I hate school, screens, and parks?
I have my thoughts, books, and walks in the dark

When was the last time I felt like this
This curious euphoria, this eagerly learning bliss?

Thinking about it, I've felt it before
The first time being when I was four

When I had tried my own little tests
An encyclopedia convinced me that science was the best

And then again when I was six
I saw a table in a PTA mist

And I became a Brownie Girl Scout
Because I liked badges and camps and helping others out

And when I reached the age of seven
I picked up a violin and found heaven

And in middle school in a Floridian vale
I felt that same rush when I learned how to sail

And in grade eight in the city of Detroit
I found my passion with my activist's voice

As an underclassman, my heart reached new highs
Hiking up to touch the Shenandoah skies

There's been so many choices that I've made
That exhilarated me and made me who I became

And feeling this now as I first try to code
I know I've found a new passion for my mind to download

Fall is (finally) in the air
With a cold front and apples everywhere
With long sleeves in vogue and school back in swing
Costumes in windows and pumpkin everything

Something is brighter and crisper today
(Maybe it's 'cause the humidity went away)
So as fall kicks in with a little breeze
I look forward to a season 'neath fiery trees

It would be awfully presumptuous and disrespectful of me
To assume
That I know and understand everything
(For even if I studied one thing for my entire life
I still wouldn't even come close
To knowing everything about that thing)
Or that I could fully understand you
(You and I
Are two different beings
With two very different viewpoints
And for me to assume
That I could see as you do
Would be quite ignorant)

However

It is equally presumptuous and disrespectful of you
To assume
That I am incapable of understanding and knowing
(In fact, I already know quite a bit:
I've been studying up
And though I'm still a beginner
And there are some things I don't quite get yet
I still understand a lot)
Or that you know everything about me
(Again, you and I
Are two different people
And I see things that you don't see
And for you to insist that you can read my mind
Would be the very definition of patronizing)

Irony is
Needing a bookmark for Fahrenheit 451
Rooting around in your backpack
And the first thing you pull out
Is a fire energy pokemon card

I was just looking at some old comic art
About that time that some see as a start
And the artists all believed that we'd come together
To rebuild and outlast this terrorist weather
But looking around fifteen years later
It seems that our paranoia turned out to be greater
These artists believed that the change in the world
Would result in courage and unity untold

Well, guys, I'm so sorry that we let you all down
If you time traveled, you'd be dissapointed at what's around
Instead of becoming a United planet
Built on peace and courage unlike that before it
We've become this frightened, always fighting thing
I'm sorry for all of the things that we bring

I'm so sorry about the middle east
And about the NSA, and that's just the least
I'm sorry that techniques like waterboarding
We're used and that we don't find it abhorring
I'm sorry we couldn't look past race
To solve the hatred that we face
I'm sorry that one's orientation
Still affects how they're treated in a nation
I'm sorry we didn't learn respect
Because we hurt who we said we'd protect
So to those past artists who've come here to visit
This isn't the world you wanted, isn't it?
I'm so sorry the world turned out this way
I'm not really sure what else I can say

It's suburbia
When the dogs start howling with
Ambulance sirens

We all have our reasons
For why we're here

Not in existential sense
(Not this time)
But on this forum

We all have our reasons
For coming in
And writing in verse

Some of us
Want to hone writing skills
Some of us
Desire to describe the world
Some of us
Came looking for inspiration
Some of us
Need to let the skeletons out of our closets to breathe

I, personally
Am here because
This is the one place
I can let my
Wildest
Darkest
Most Lyrical
Descriptive
And Downright Crazy
Side out to the world
And no one will put me down for it
Or lock me up in an assylum

"Grandma, we're learning
About twenty-sixteen in
History class, so

I wanted to ask
What was it like living then?
Was it like the books?"

At which point, we all
Will sigh and say "It really
Was a dumpster fire."

"You can tell me anything
But you already do, though."
As you laughed, I nodded along
But thought "As far as you know"

Its kind of a funny thing
How the world teaches us that we need to be great
When so many of us are average

For the world to tell children
Of the need to fit in
And to tell these grown ups
Of the need to stand out

Under water colored lilacs
The water colors the world
Running along her driveway
The rain comes along and runs down
Through the mist she runs out
To see if the paperboy missed

To the new poet who wishes to be wise:
Keep your work out of sight of unwelcome eyes

To the poet first trying to find rhymes:
Give it a moment, you'll think of them in time

To the poet whose night is their day:
Just write down what's harder to say

To the poets whom I know as my friends:
Let's write until the universe ends

I walk along
A rainy nova street
Beneath a lilac umbrella

And through the trees
I see shimmers of cool grey
Through the mist

And I have
A familiar feeling

And suddenly
I'm not in nova
The land of traffic jams and crazy schools and swampy heat

I am walking down a street in Howth
A castle behind me
In the cobbles to the street

And in that moment
I am thirteen
And running along
With my sister and grandma and grandad
Hoping we get to the DART station on time

In that moment
I hear birds chirping
Cars running
And the soft, lovable patter
Of rain on leaves

The magic of a flashback

She's terror and beauty and logic and grace
She looks around time and dances through space
She's academia and nature, the books and the trees
Trapped in a loop, yet eternally free
She understands others but is her own girl
She respects others but lives in her own world
She doesn't start fights but she sure as he'll finishes them
She wonders where she's going and where she's been
She's knowledge and truth, justice, beauty, and love
She is the philosopher, living here, looking above

I believe in equality
That people should not be authority and subjects
But equals with different skill sets and positions

I believe in advancement
That our world will change over time
That progress will be made
That inventors and artists will create
And leaders and makers will revolutionize

I believe in understanding
That we can learn to understand our world, our place in it, and our fellow humans
That we can gain the knowledge to shape our environment and ourselves

I believe in hope for the future, carpe diem, and in remembering the stories of the past

Let's do this

I hope that one day I will be
Like the people who inspired me

I hope that one day the world will see
What it is to be peaceful and free

I hope that people will become
Understanding of everyone

I hope that I can become someone
That inspires the others beneath the sun