I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
  of the pleasures of hoeing;
  there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.

The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing
  moist-dark loam--
  the pea-root's home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.

How neatly the green weeds go under!
  The blade chops the earth new.
  Ignorant the wise boy who
has never rendered thus the world fecunder.

Black queen on the red king,
the seven on the black
eight, eight goes on the nine, bring
the nine on over, place
jack on the queen. There is space
now for that black king who,
six or so cards back,
was buried in the pack.
Five on six, where's seven?
Under the ten. The ace
must be under the two.
Four, nine on ten, three, through.
It's after eleven.

Society sells beautiful lies,
Emphasis on the beautiful,
They sell you the definition of beauty in
small pictures,
small ads,
small sizes.
Spinning the world on a string,
They've got us all fooled.
Telling teens they don't need to eat,
"Skip the food today,
be beautiful tomorrow".
Selling the idea that beauty can replace sorrows.
Society sells the idea that beauty is empowerment.
Society sells the idea that if you are beautiful,
then you could have the world on a string.
These lies lead our leaders of tomorrow into disarray.
Sell us the idea that if we are beautiful
today will be better than yesterday.
But the empty promises lead us all astray,
Abandoned on street corners begging for scraps,
because we didn't think we felt empowerment.

Society sells small,
Society sells beauty,
Society sells small.
Small models,
Small manikins,
Small sizes.
Spinning the world on a string,
Society sells the idea that the size of your waist,
defines how beautiful you are.
Society sells the idea that beauty
is empowerment.
Society sells small.
Society sells the idea that if you are not small,
you are not empowered,
ugly,
waste of space.
Society sells small.
Society says beauty is empowerment.
These lies lead our leaders of tomorrow into disarray,
Too many teens today are to prone to facings their problems with razor blades,
Because today was not better than yesterday.
Then tomorrow won't be either.

Society sells small,
small pictures,
small ads,
small manikins.
Society sells protruding plastic ribs,
ribs sharp enough to cut paper.
Society sells the figures of the sick and dying.

Society sells small.
Small enough to be drop dead gorgeous,
Emphasis on the drop dead,
Society sells women who are severely underfed.
Society sells women suffering from malnutrition.
Since when did this become tradition?
Since when was fragile stature empowering?
Society sells skin and bones.
Society sells so small,
**women are literally dying to feel beautiful.

Your "treatment of me is not a direct reflection of my value as a human being", so what is it?
Maybe it's because you're surrounded by people and still feel alone.
But it's probably because of your daddy issues.
You've forgotten what it was like to be respected by a man, so you went searching to fill the gaps;
But all you found were empty promises.
You got tempted along the way and somewhere you lost your self-esteem;
Self-Respect turned into Self-Hate, and your bitterness grew bigger and bigger.
You're losing more and more each day,
but you lost your innocence a long time ago so its okay.
Your daddy used to tell you that Respect was love;
But somewhere along the way you tried to replace it.
You confused yourself by thinking that Love was respect.
You've lost all respect for yourself,
and tried to tear me down so I'd take myself down too,
And I'm glad to say that I may be a stranger to love,
But I know respect.

So I'm here to tell you that you don't need a man to give you respect,
as long as you love yourself.
Not the kind of love you buy on a street corner,
or find in your bed,
But the kind that you feel in your heart,
and know in your head.

I am the queen of stutter.
There was a time every creak and crack in my bones resonated between every slur of a word and every pop in my vowels.
I was a young girl with a white picket fence and yet there were still moments when words mixed and broke and-and-and-and
kids thought it was weird.
So I hid the voice with lollipops and suckers because I was
"That kid" and the "Freak" and I started to believe it like I believed my mothers bedtime stories that rested in her cheeks.
I was a broken jar and no matter how many times you tried to put me back together I always broke again and again and again.

There was a time where words came out together,
like a butterfly hatching from a cocoon and instead having feathers. I spoke with a voice of the age of four and before I was five I spoke no more because ****, vowels came out like clicks and grinds and everyone told me they paid no mind but I knew that they hated it liked I hated consonants. And I think the reason I hated it so much was because it reminded me too much of her and it made me feel like I was turning into her and all I could see was her standing over me like a murderer stands over a corpse and for a moment I forgot what it meant to be cradled to a chest, fluttering with a beating heart.



The first time my mother left, It was June.
She gave me a kiss on both cheeks and said she'd be away for awhile but that her love for me was longer than any mile that she would have to cross. I kissed her on both cheeks and it wasn't until she left that I realized that I was the one pushing her out the door. So when my dad came home from work he found an empty house and nothing more, he knew where to find me. I sat out in the pouring rain on a swing set that was older than my veins and waited to be saved to be rescued to be heard to be found to be be be be be be
I, was the queen of stutter.
And I had dropped that off when I moved from the city and I started a new life, carving it out of the trees outside with motivation and a knife. I did not yet understand that life was difficult.
But then my mother did not return and my father got scared because she had been the only one to ever love him the way he needed to be loved. And I did not understand so I started to carve life out of my palms and wrists and every **** kiss and nothing was ever good enough. I was the kid that turned to pill bottles and drugs but it was a metaphors for my dying bones and cracking lips. I breathed air that was blue and told my dad lies that were true and I was lost in a lost world, where being found was something that happened when you were dead and God, I wanted to be found.

So the story continued on and I wrote poetry to encompass my heart and my lungs and I painted over myself, scribbled all the mismatches and righted out all of the wrongs. Life seemed to continue and my dad had been injecting life into his veins and had been living at the doctors and had been tired all the time and had been lonely and sad and had been gone. He promised me a graduation and maybe even my wedding if he was lucky. I took these words with me everywhere I went and trust me if I could marry now I would in a heart beat.

I am fifteen.
My marriage has not yet come but I feel like I have all the time in the world and the doctor is only a place my dad goes to visit now. I can make words come out of my mouth the way they appear in my head and I now know the meaning to carving life into my bones and into the hues of the sunset. I am no longer afraid of every click and grind and twist and churn in my brain because it reminds me that I am alive and breathing and that my veins are filled with blood and that I breathe air like every other person does.
I was the queen of stutter.
Now I am the queen of hope.