By mental age they say I am 43.
Old soul, yes.
I have crows feet from perpetual introspection,
reading books in dim light, inspecting the folds of time
for the tiniest wrinkle
that proves I was born in the wrong century, wrong time.
By some un-ironed twist of fate, I was placed in the wrong womb.
But I am resourceful, I can bloom where I was planted,
Though I will always have heart strings in the past.

I do not know what to make of this.
these scraps of clay and paper
that were once “Us” and now are “you” and “I.”
Paper-mache remnants of lonely romantic’s dreams
you present to me as relics of a bygone year.
I know you would like to rebuild.
But things are better this way.
Our hearts have thrown enough punches in the dark.

I used to wonder
if I was going to die young. Not that I am so familiar with death
but that I could not imagine growing up.
Now, on the cusp of twenty,
the impossible age, in a sixth-grader’s mind,
those stale-******* memories fading fast,
I realize I still can’t think very far past thirty.
I’ve always got one foot in the past.

Most days, I can fade into the cracked, plaster walls
in their peeling blue paint, smeared with oily hand prints
from wayward class demonstrations.
A prison cell? No. A holding cell? Maybe.
Where I am interrogated
through glossy textbook pages and sickly fluorescent lights
these castles of learning
are dim places indeed.

I am not a woman of Mona Lisa smiles,
(if she's even trying to smile).
I am not coy, no pretense, simply shy.
There is really little mystery to me.
My heart is on my sleeve,
my mind is an open book.
Few take time to notice the blood drops on my clothes
Read the lines scrawled across my forehead,
inspect my ink stained hands,
or read the late night rambles I hesitate to call poetry.

I am simplistic, with stripes of imperfection,
My music has been called "Sweet"
as one might say a child is sweet,
in a winsome, ribbon-laced fashion.
I know it is simple. Juvenile.
But children can speak with more depth
than their mature, beautiful parents.
My poetry is merely fractions
of my soul, disguised on a page
to look like words.
Nothing quite a masterpiece,
I'd be shunned from the guilds of European masters.  
I am folk art, they are Rembrandt.
I've never been known to send someone to a dictionary,
or force a rhyme in Chaucer's name.

It is all simple shards of imagination
That managed to struggle out of my brain, down my arms,
and into my hands.
They're mangled by the time they arrive.
Colorful pilgrims worn by hard weather,
and lack of skill,
but no less pious.

She stood among the thin, goose-fleshed schoolgirls
with their full moon eyes
and straw braid hair.
Reciting Chaucer, Emerson, Frost,
as their feet scraped against
cured leather shoes,
toes curling with each word,
beauty lost in the hands of a sinister teacher,
no room for beauty with discipline.

Later she met the Janitor's boy in the broom closet,
She found beauty there, in his sweet, nonsense whispers,
fragments of Neruda bloomed in her mind,
Straw braid undone, leather shoes off.
Solomon's Song was written in his fingertips,
rough from mop handles and water buckets.
Their innocence burned in the dark,
their words unclouded,
Memorized verses on their breath,
they meant every line.
And she knew this was what the poets wrote of.

Here is another lost soul on campaign.
Hardened veteran of dark words,
fighting to retain the beachhead of sanity, so narrowly won.
Tell them to hang a black banner
for the mind missing in action.
Tell them not to hold their breath,
Waiting for a homecoming .
It will die on foreign, but familiar soil.
So it is with poets.
We few. We happy few.