even if i won't ever admit it,
i want to be remembered.

i think that's why i give
mix tapes and mp3s
instead of picture frames
and flower bunches.

i'll give you something that lasts,
something that will restore
your youth with every lyric
and caress your memory
with every opening chord.

you'll forget the girls in the frames.
they're all just empty smiles
and red satin fading into the grey
of the photo album in your attic.

but you'll remember the girl
who taught you that listening
can be most intimate.
and whose breath
you can always taste
in each crescendo.

you have to remind yourself that it won't always be like this. that someday approaches (probably faster than you think) and when it arrives, it will wake you up at 6:00 a.m for work you could do better at 9. hopefully, you'll enjoy it. someday will keep you fastened to a desk and cramped in a cubicle, your fingers typing out memos and emails and spreadsheets quicker than your legs ever carried you during your middle school mile. someday might chase away the little things that nudge you in the back of your brain when you remember that there is a world outside your window. someday will make you wish you had the luxury of being nineteen on summer break and calling yourself bored. and someday will come. maybe tomorrow or maybe a few years from now, when you trade in your textbooks for road maps and your goals for yesterdays.

but right now, here you are, calling yourself bored. you are not bored. how can you be, when you are nineteen on summer break with cinnamon hair that has just been kissed lighter by the sun? when you still have fictional characters to cry over or philosophical paradoxes to ponder or world hunger to solve or even just a heart that is still in need of breaking by a boy across the sea. you can't stop someday from stealing peter pan away from your bedroom window and diminishing neverland into a castle of ashes, but you can remind yourself that it's just some day. and right now, you have an infinite number of them in front of you, just waiting to be seized.

if i had an art museum,
it would have a blue roof
and white walls, and
it would be filled with
nothing but mirrors.

one by one,
people would walk in,
expecting to see a dali,
da vinci, or van gogh
along the hallway.

but instead, they would
spend the day becoming
connoisseurs of their own
curves, freckles, and
wavering footsteps.

and i'd sit in a corner
with a notepad in hand
and an unseen smile.
people sometimes forget
that they too are art.

i don't quite know what i expect out of a phone call at one a.m. maybe that it will cross three hundred miles and bring your voice close enough so i can caress its every pause and articulation. maybe that it will somehow make two weeks dissolve into seconds and echo back to life the moments i may have missed. maybe that it will end in i love you. but this technology is a fragile thing, for it can funnel sound across continents and still miscarry what's needed to be heard most.

i don't quite know what i expected from a phone call at one a.m. but it certainly wasn't for a minute between sighs to seem like an hour, like it does when my lungs gasp hopelessly for breath underwater. it wasn't for me to prove that i don't need you, when i may be coming to terms with the fact that i just might. it wasn't for my heart to feel so empty, grasping at the static and the rain to conjure you forth from miles away. i reach out into the morning but a phone call at one a.m cannot fix you. not too long ago, i wouldn't have thought that it needed to.

you never called back.
or maybe you did.
but by that time,
the water was emptied
and my heart crumbled
into a valley of ashes.

i was done swimming
in hope's shallow pool,
which i knew would share in
the pulse of a telephone ring,
if it ever happened.

and i still see your green light
when i turn toward the dock,
but i can see there is a light
much brighter beyond it now,
the yellow of the sun.

to remind me that there is more
than jazz, the emptiness of
liquor left to disappear into heat
and a girl with a voice full of money.

someone once told me
i was worth the whole ****
bunch of you all put together.
for the first time, i think i believe it.

when i was little,
people confused me
so i made friends with
the pavement instead.

all summer long,
we traded scraped knees
and cement skid marks,
admiring our scars
like secrets in the dark.

and when autumn came,
and the other girls looked out
for matching bracelets,
i hunted for matching scars
and the ones that i knew
would understand.

i've never been homeless.
that's to say, i've never slept on concrete
or had my pick of the countless lawn gnomes
of suburbia to rest my head against,
away from the light of a campfire
and a scary story to tease my eyes shut.

but if someone were to ask me,
sweetheart, where is your home?
a cab driver with an open window,
or perhaps a caring stranger,
his coat pockets lined with tissues,
i still wouldn't quite know how to answer.