i’ve found that i do the most learning during second semester.

for example, second semester of freshman year i learned that losing friends is a lot like losing a life,
that losing friends kind of usually makes you really want to die,
that losing friends is like a comet blasting its way through your heart--
it sets you ablaze for a moment,
but then by the time you notice its absence it’s already circling another planet.
losing friends is always hard.
keep a death toll if you have to, but adding a tally mark for yourself isn’t worth it.
learn the art of letting go.
learn the art of getting by.
it’s hard, and it sometimes feels impossible,
but don’t expect too much from anything.
don’t expect too much from anyone,
but god forbid you let yourself lose all feeling.
yes, feeling hurts, yes, feeling is hard,
but going numb and cold leads to frostbite
and you'll just end up amputating the limbs that you have left.

the second semester of sophomore year,
i learned what it was like to never feel at home in your own bones.
you’re always drifting, interstate international interstellar intergalactic.
it’s all the same thing.
it’s okay to let yourself wander,
and it’s okay if you find yourself kneeling on foreign bathroom floors clutching porcelain like it’s your last lifeline.
learn that home is where your heart is.
don’t invest your heart into anything.
learn that there are teenage boys out there who will spin galaxies into your spine when they hold you close,
but learn that romance is stigmatized.
learn that relationships don’t have to be forever,
that nothing is ever really forever.
learn that friends will last longer than lovers,
and learn to tell the difference between friends and lovers.
make plans to travel the world with your soulmate,
and make sure your soulmate is someone who wants to travel the world with you.
the second semester of sophomore year,
i learned that losing friends is a lot like losing a life,
only this time it was worse because this time i was built out of scar tissue
and scar tissue is tougher to tear through but they did it anyway.
i’m still learning the art of letting go.
i’m learning that it’s okay to write as much angry, heart-broken poetry as you need to in order to get over it
because friendships wrap tighter around your heart than any other kind of relationship.
learn that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
but learn to be kind to your mother, because she is trying.

the second semester of junior year
i learned the names of every single person that i could pour my whole soul into,
and just because i don’t share everything with someone doesn’t mean we aren’t friends.
i’ve learned that i have friends.
just because we aren’t awake together at 3 a.m.
doesn’t mean that they don’t sit next to me in all the classes we’re both in,
it doesn’t mean that they don’t go driving with me at 3 p.m.
a friend doesn’t have to be someone you spend every waking moment with.
a friend can just be someone that you coexist with,
someone who makes you feel like you aren’t really all that alone.

the second semester of junior year i’ve learned that i am still learning.
i’m still figuring things out.
maybe by the second semester of senior year i’ll have learned something closer to, say, what i’m doing for the next four to six years,
or maybe i’ll finally master the art of letting go.

the second half of high school
i’ve learned that, yeah, scar tissue grows.
but scars fade.
and the concave space in your chest doesn’t have to keep on growing into a black hole,
that you can fill up your cracks and crevices with stardust and iron.
losing friends is like losing a life. but, god, when they come back--

it’s okay to feel things.
it’s okay to feel too much and all at once.
it’s okay to vent and rave and scream.
it’s okay to write bad poetry about sins that you’ve already forgiven and people you’ve already forgotten and places you’ve already left behind.
it’s okay.
it’s okay to hold onto your humanity.
make maps with your own freckles and follow your veins to your eyes.
make eye contact with your own reflection.
if you can’t teach yourself something,
then how is anyone else ever going to listen?

The yelling, screaming, shouting,
In my head,
I can't focus on anything,
I have to remind myself to breathe,
I have to convince myself to breathe,
I have to tell myself I want to go on,
But it all depends on me,
It's all up to me,
No one else can save me,
No one else can lift me from this vacuum,
But how can you save someone you hate?

God bless America,
Land of irony
Because nothing is ever actually free—
Not when our economy is fueled by tragedy,
Not when we keep armies in the East just to keep gas prices cheap.
If you take the top eight military
budgets of the world,
over 50% of that sum is the United States, so
God bless America.
As rivers of blood flood the streets in Syria,
God bless America.
Land of the religiously free,
Land where "God bless America" could refer to any one of the gods acknowledged
by its inhabitants.

God bless America,
Where Muslims of all races have to apologize for ISIS but white Christians don’t have to apologize for the KKK.
When the **** party tried to destroy an entire race in Germany, it became illegal to ever speak favorably of them,
But, hey, here you can execute your right to ‘freedom of speech.’
The First Amendment protects you from being silenced by the government,
But it doesn’t protect you from backlash of the people you’ve offended, the people you’ve appropriated, the people who are sick of having to put up with this.

God bless America,
Where segregation apparently ended in the 60s,
Where women apparently achieved equality in the 20s,
Where the LGBTQ community is seen as trendy simply because you can no longer be arrested for being out and proud.
God bless America,
Where the majority of kids on the streets are queer teens and where
It’s still seen as acceptable to wave the flag of the Confederacy.

God bless America,
But God forsake everyone else.

God bless America, for every single unwarranted and unjustified arrest.
God bless America for false information and standardized tests.
God bless America
For every flaw we refuse to fix.

And as we destroy our planet without thought
of the fact that it’s currently the only feasible place for us to live,
I make one last request:
May the future generations be blessed,
Because God knows they'll need it.

1995 saw the start of Generation Z,
the ‘iKids’ with a knack for this new-fangled technology,
Millennial 2.0,
caught in the limbo of the World Wide Web development and Rose Gold iPhones.
They say we’re adaptable,
but apparently we can’t make our own decisions about anything.
They say that we don’t care about anything
except for our tiny little screens,
but they forget who put them in our hands,
and they forget who they run to for help
when they forget how to troubleshoot.
They forget what kind of technology we need to keep sustaining life in the Information Age,
Caught in a crossfire because
Yeah, we’re 90s kids—but the 90s never really actually ended until 2006,
the only difference between two decades being
how much neon versus how much chrome,
and just how expensive accidentally opening the internet app on your mom’s blackberry phone was.
We’re nostalgic for all the things we can’t quite remember,
and half these high schoolers weren’t actually born until 2000 or 2001.
Most of us aren’t old enough to even remember 9/11, nothing outside of the news clips that our teachers show us in history class every single September.
I was born in the same year as the Columbine shootings.
The United States has not been at peace for a year of my life.
We are always fighting— fighting for everything.
Human equality,
posing arguments about micro aggressions and refugees, seeing the inhumanity in the past that we’re living.

None of us are older than 21,
under such hard scrutiny while Baby Boomers Wave 2 still run our country.
We inherited the Millenial’s exhaustion,
the generation before us spending our childhood fighting for all the things that we have never really believed in.
Fairytales.

Generation Z.
The ‘iKids’ who are going to one day be making leaps and bounds with technology,
the generation to nurse this dying planet back to health,
Millennials 2.0 who know how to learn from our forerunners’ mistakes,
who know how to adapt from Sidekicks to iPhone 6S Plus in less than a decade.
We’re the kids who have realized that fun is found in safe spaces rather than invading each other’s personal spaces.

They say we’re too sensitive,
but at the same time they claim that we’re desensitized.
And I thought we were the generation that couldn't make decisions.

i spent the back half of freshman year as a ghost, drifting through these halls without ever touching anything, haunting my own bones with nothing more under my skin than an echo, watery lungs and glassy eyes that couldn’t see past my own transparency. floating. i don’t like to talk about it.

i spent the start of sophomore year as a zombie, revived but not quite alive again, less like glass and more like porcelain, trailing my hands along the murals and trying to feel again. i existed, but i was still searching for existence. in january i found pieces of myself in a meteor, and in amethyst geodes and lunar eclipses i found that i was less undead and more E.T.
either way i didn’t feel quite human, like i was off by two shades, so i doodled UFOs into the corners of all my notes and wrote poems about people who smiled like stars in the halls, whose laughs made me feel like i was finally home.

i’ve spent all of junior year driving. nothing feels okay in the same way that leaving does. highways sing lullabyes with road signs, other late-night cruisers sending Morse code messages to the helicopters overhead. i don’t have to think.
i’ve spent all of junior year side-stepping every single pestering question about what i’m doing with the next ten years of my life, signing away my soul to banks for student loans, all for a degree that statistically i won’t even need down the road for anything past sharpening my job resumes, like “hey, look, i’ve got all this debt in the pursuit of a higher education, please hire me.”

i’ve spent my junior year catching up on breathing.
i’ve spent my junior year catching up on sleeping.
i spent the first two years of high school half-dead and fully awake, chugging along like a train destined for nowhere, nothing.

i want to spend my senior year moving.
i want to spend my senior year running.
i want to spend my senior year finding life through expelling the ghosts in my bones and burning the skeletons that always left dust on my conscious whenever i reached past them to get t-shirts out of my closet.
i want to spend my senior year shouting.
i want to spend my senior year knowing that i am already everything i ever will be combined with everything i already was.
i want to spend my senior year forming galaxies with my fingertips.
i want to end my high school career knowing that there is a universe of possibilities inside of me.

i spent freshman year as a ghost, but ghosts are best used as metaphors for memories,
and something i’m best at is forgetting.
there are days where i still feel like a zombie, but who doesn’t feel like that at least every single monday morning?

what’s the good institution
when evil is institutionalized
what’s the good teacher
when the student is criminalized

instill in us some morals, sure
but what are morals in a
“more or less” world?

bite the hand that feeds
it’s only poison you’re eating
bite the hand that feeds
these aren’t the toxins you need

cats out of their bags
lions in their cages
eat it raw eat it raw eat it
red and soaked in blood

bite the hand that feeds
it’s only poison you’re eating
bite the hand that feeds
these aren’t the toxins you need

bite the hand that feeds
bite the hand that feeds
eat it raw eat it raw eat it red
bite the hand that feeds
it’s poison it’s poison it’s
toxic waste toxic time toxic
valentines with pretty lies

bite the hand that feeds
it’s only poison you’re eating
bite the hand that feeds
these aren’t the toxins you need

these aren’t the toxins you need
not the toxins
not the toxins
not the toxins you need

expecto patronum.
the first time i got on stage
and read my words to a library full of high schoolers
with wide eyes and open ears, i thought i was going to puke.
everywhere.
my hands were vibrating like all the molecules in them
were trying to break free and leave,
like i was trying to break free and leave.
but *******, i’d never felt so alive.
i’m learning that if you’re afraid of things that, sometimes,
it just means that they matter.
the first time i was on stage, i practically shook out of my skin.
i thought i was going to ***** or faint or explode all over the front row.
and when i didn’t, i realized nothing else would ever feel good enough
after that in comparison.
i guess i’ve always expected to be a poem that everybody forgot about,
not one they memorized all the words to so when i stood on stage
and people told me they like the way my heart beats,
that’s… that’s everything.

expecto patronum.
the time difference between rome and kansas city is 7 hours.
we pile all the pillows and blankets into my hotel room,
and we drink limoncello from paper cups,
talking about everything and nothing.
our mouths are always running away, tangled up with our hearts.
we have been laughing too hard and running into the ocean
without looking back for the last two weeks.
it’s a funny feeling, to know that you are in the middle of a memory.
there are places to be in the morning, places to leave behind.
you sing along to weezer, half asleep under a mess of blankets,
and i like to pretend that you sing for me.
you will always remind me of the sun of my skin.
i love every single person in this room so much it’s kind of ridiculous,
a bond born of late nights and dumb jokes and stranger streets.
this is the time of my life thus far.
around 3 AM the room clears and i feel a little less lonely
than i’d ever been.

expecto patronum.*
we are singing along to saturday, front row of the lawn.
it’s been twelve years since 2003 but we still know every word,
learned them along the way,
and fall out boy still closes the show on
the same guitar chords and melody.
some things don’t need to change.
the song gets more relevant by the year,
and that’s how you know art is good --
when it still matters after you probably should’ve outgrown it.
our feet still keep time.
so we’ll always have saturday and the songs we play,
blaring loud from borrowed speakers and mouths.
i close my eyes and sing along, not caring if it’s off-key.
my ribcage feels like it is not near enough to contain my heart.
and when pete wentz says
“can i see the kids on the lawn tonight get ******* loud?” into the mic, we all scream.

expecto patronum.  
i am seventeen today
and i still fluctuate between feeling seven and seventy,
but that’s okay.
today’s not a day for counting candles anyways.
today, we drove downtown to sit outside as it gets dark
and listen to other people sing because we can’t carry a **** tune.
later, we climb and sit, watch the city lights spread out beneath us.
in that moment, there’s nothing better. there’s nothing else.
we know it’s a lie, but it still feels like this city belongs to us,
at least for tonight.

expecto patronum.
we are groggy, somewhere between sleep and consciousness
as 2016 rolls in.
the last week of 2015 has been a good one,
full of sore feet and laughing and sunsets i’d never seen yet,
but we’re tired now.
the display menu for star wars: the empire strikes back
is playing in a loop on my TV screen,
we both fell asleep before darth vader tells luke that he’s his father.
upstairs i can hear people counting, cheering.
tomorrow i will drink flutes of champagne for breakfast
and think the snow outside is beautiful
even though i hate the way it feels.
the morning light will feel new and old at the same time.
my skin fits a little better now than it did a year ago.
i’m not always good, but i am so much better.
right now, there’s nowhere i’d rather be.