stood at the top of a concrete hill
longboard under my feet
down I go

my arms go out
flap like wings
I feel feathers

every flap sends
a gust of wind
through my hair

they flap faster, faster
faster still
until I take flight

for a moment
I control the weather
cyclone, I think

every problem disappears
I'm weightless
pure bliss

it never lasts
my wings falter
I begin to fall

the worlds problems whisper
marred words in my ear
in the form of laughter

as I hit the ground
I scream
they scream back

no
it never lasts

To whomever is the next unlucky boy to momentarily fall in love with me,
     You should know, that when I fall, I do not simply slip down a step on the stairs. I plunge into the depths of the ocean, sink to the bottom of the mariana trench.
     I will relinquish my heart, body, and soul to you. Whether you reciprocate or not, I will give myself to you completely, let you see my soft spots and my rough patches, the lines around my eyes and the fat on my thighs, the scars on my wrist and the hair on my arms.
     You will give me an inch in return for my mile, but it will be the most precious inch I have ever seen.
     I will say I love you too soon, but I will mean it with every fiber of my being.
     When you lie through your teeth I will believe you, because you will have told me that you will not lie. I will always believe you.
     For a few months everything will be perfect. Then I will try to formally gift you my soul, unpatch it to show you my all. You will look at it with pity, refuse to meet my eyes for a week. Eventually, I will find it buried in the trash, between moldy red apples and an empty box.
     You will say that you love me. I will quietly beg you to show me, to prove yourself. You will pretend not to hear, and I will believe it is my fault for screaming so loud that you went deaf. You will silently agree.

To the next unlucky boy who briefly falls in love with me,
     You will say that you've fallen out of love.
     I will cry,
     say I hate you, I will never speak to you again.
     Sometimes we will pass each other, I will do my best to avoid it, but I will look you in the eyes. For a moment I will feel the chords between us that I cut connect again. I will have to cut them again.
     I will tell myself I do not love you, that I never did,
     But I will never stop.

I have a collection full of every unlucky boy who has ever had the misfortune of falling in love with me. If I was to fall off a building  like humpty dumpty you would see their names are tattooed on the grey matter inside my skull, engraved on every bone in my body. My body will move on, but the memory will never leave me.

You are my world, so can I be your moon?

My gravity will pull and push you,
Creating tides in the depths of your oceans and the surface of your atmosphere
I will cause some of your highest highs and will be there for you at your lowest lows.

I am composed of debris from a nameless planet colliding with earth long ago
Which means I am
literally
your other half.

Our orbit began during chaos
I needed someone to cling to
someone to love like I love you.

Now we're locked in this give and take forever
At least until the sun swallows us whole
in forty billion years.
Somehow, that's still not long enough.

I'm not sure if there's an after life for celestial beings
So I pray to every god I can think of that there is
So I will never spend too long in the silent absence of you -
It always crawls at my skin to think of missing you.

For now
I'll sit back and enjoy the view.

Ever wonder why the moon has no atmosphere?
It's because the earth took its breath away.

It is 12:43 in the morning.

I am envisioning lighting my face on fire.

Eyelashes drenched in kerosene, dripping down my chin, soaking my hair

Blink. Blink. Light.

I feel the scrape of the lighter under the pad of my thumb before my hair catches fire

face engulfed in flame, turned to blistered flesh in seconds.

People use the term “faceless” to describe someone they do not know the identity of.

For that reason, my appearance finally matches my lack of identity.

No pun intended.

I look at you like you hung the moon

If I’m not touching on you, kissing you, playing with your hair,
If I’m not ******* or ******* you,
You look at me like a burden, an annoyance

An itch you can’t seem to scratch
A bug that just won’t go away
A blister rubbing against your shoe

You like me best as a pretty picture on the wall
Smiling until you call for me
Obeying and loving every second of it

Even when you look at me like that

You hung the moon

sometimes, out of great pensivity,
instead of telling the truth
when people ask "how are you"
I hold on to the idea of "privacy"

not today

for the second time this week
I break

the parts of me I dammed shut
came bursting out fast as Niagra Falls

these words I scream are like rocks,
breaking happiness on friends faces
like stained glass churches

and my happy dust falls away
leaving everyone in stunned numbness

shadows of questions drip off their faces
as if they had wicks sticcking out of their heads

what do you say to people you love
when you didn't mean to say anything at all?

nothing.

you run out of there
as fast as legs can move
and hide sobs
with pillow cases

Whenever an old white guy butts into the middle of my conversation
without fail he forces his opinion into my ears
down my eustachian tubes and into my stomach.
his opinion always comes up, like saltine crackers when you're sick
or too much ***** when you're dumb.
It burns my throat on the way up, but I never stop it
I don't have the will to swallow it down.
My face gets red even as the words come out of my mouth

That is to say

When an old white guy interrupts my conversation
asks me a rhetorical question in a demeaning tone
and acts like he's a greek philospher while I'm a lowly
"stupid teenage girl"

I find myself agreeing with him.
I never truly believe him,
but something in me becomes inexplicably embarrassed,
it's easier to spew his own ideas back at him than it is to hold my ground.

This is something I've been working on.

See, maybe he is like a philosopher.
His words can sound convincing
But pretty words don't equate to the truth.
He is aristotle.

Aristotle was wrong about biology
Chemistry
Psychology
Astronomy
and yes
Basic. Human. Rights.

I may just be a stupid teenage girl,
but aren't all the revolutionaries?

I've found my new obsession.

Smirk affixed to his face
with sarcastic remarks
and slippery words,

mysterious in that stupid
teenage way.

I'd **** to hear what he has to say
about the nonsensical *******
we're forced to endure
each day
that the government calls an
"education".

I'm sure
his opinions on how
we're taught to the standardized tests,
nothing more
and nothing less
could cause enough raw power
to run the whole of New York City
for a month.

Though, too, I'd **** to learn
the terrain of his lips
as our bodies
slammed
against lockers,

oblivious classmates
a wall away
consumed by the
awesome
world of geography,
missing out on something
so
much
more.

He and I,
we'd know what more is,
we'd know how to consume it,
how to keep it at bay,
how to work it
like a hat,
a hat we aren't allowed to wear
at school.

We'd laugh at our own obscurity,
and shared secrets
would run through our veins
like blood,

one cut and it all spills

your words are pushpins.

pushpins that held my dreams in place
on the wall of lilac lies
that you built around me.

they left termite holes
in the gypsum board
that remind me

of how useless a promise can be.