staring, staring, staring
off into the distance
you assume my gaze is fixed at the wall
but i see a different world
im staring with my heart
not my eyes

With the momentum of a setting sun, the subtlety of stars,
We embrace a world that we created, still we cannot make it ours,
You walk your television talk, turn and shoot from your smile,
Ride atop your highest horse, enjoy the view from denial,
When the whole world is medicated, cure becomes the disease,
Either fall in line and be counted, or learn to fight from your knees,
They tore our cities asunder, and from ash built angrier gods,
We compromised for the children, now they consider us frauds,
Losing our souls to the static, drowning in manufactured waves,
Content to be the heroes that no one needs and no one saves,
On a slow search for Heaven, or at least more interesting sins,
But an ending is still an ending, no matter where it begins.

you are darkness,
or so you like to pretend to be,
i am light,
or so i’d like to be,
but together we are grey,
together we are human,
or human enough,

when i was six years old my whole family went to disney world and being the self-respecting born and bred star wars fans we were, my brother and i cajoled our parents into letting us buy pictures of our little faces photoshopped onto the faces of star wars characters.

my brother? anakin skywalker. and me? aayla secura.
who you probably haven't heard of, even if you're a pretty big fan of the series. to get you up to speed, aayla secura was a jedi knight and a general during the clone wars era in the prequel trilogy, which is all suitably ******* badass, but if i remember right she has roughly five minutes of screen time in the movies and even less in lines. and you probably remember her as that one blue chick.

and if i remember right she was also one of about three or four female options for the pictures. sure, there was padme amidala and princess leia, who are badass ladies in their own rights, but see the thing is that no six year old watches starwars and thinks to themselves, "hmm, i want to be a politician!" you think to yourself, "i want to be a jedi." and the only option that was a girl and a jedi was a background character.

but that's the thing isn't it? being a background character, a love interest, a side-kick is something girls grow used to seeing themselves cast as. sure, we're in the movie, but with half the lines and screen time. never the center of the story. never the hero, just the pretty girl with fluttery eyelashes he saves. too often i found myself having to invent my own characters and stories so that i could feel that i was part of a narrative, too.

and suddenly, more than ten years too late for for six year old me but just in time for a whole new generation of little girls, the person in the center of the poster clutching a blue lightsaber like a beacon of the light side was a girl.

so this halloween as i'm handing out candy i will see myself in every little girl with her hair twisted into three buns and light saber in her hand and the galaxy in her eyes. finally, finally the story is about her.

Remember last New Years Eve?

We had plans to go to my aunts house,
then last minute you decided that you didn't want to go. You decided that you wanted to throw a party, not at our apartment, but at your fathers house. I thought this was strange, but I agreed to ditch out on my family, for you. You left early to prepare for this party; told me to meet you there later, but when I showed up at your door, you turned me away. I was dumb founded. You told me that it just wasn't the kind of party that I'd be into. What does that even mean? I should specify though, you didn't actually answer the door && tell me to leave. You were never man enough for such a thing. You texted me. I was standing outside of your door, && you texted me && told me to leave. So I did. What was I supposed to do at that point, beg to be let into a place where I was clearly unwelcome? I walked back to my car, in my sequined party dress. I drove back to our apartment. We had one of those text fights we always had; the kind where I asked you why you had done something unkind to me, && you flipped it so that by the end of the conversation I was apologizing to you && begging for forgiveness. I sat there in the dark, in the apartment, for the remainder of the night. I cried myself to sleep.

Fast forward to this year. You have the audacity to contact me, asking if I miss you. What I miss is the person I was before I knew the likes of you.

Here's to a new year, untainted by your touch.

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.

1.  i left my soul on the last stage i was on. i have this problem where sometimes it feels that i am only alive when i’m bleeding. we are double edged swords of people. we always get cut up. people are only the aftermath of their actions.

2. as long as you have hands, you can build something. as long as you have hands, you can break something. as long as you have hands, you can punch through walls. as long as you have hands, you can fill in the holes. as long as you have hands, you are not helpless.

3. disco inferno can be translated from latin to mean: i learn by means of hell. trial by fire. so unlearning things is hard. i don't believe in anything yet i still catch myself praying sometimes.

4. the entire world watched kate middleton’s wedding to prince william because we wanted so badly to believe that they loved each other so they’d stay loving each other. we like fairytales even more since we started realizing how often they don’t end in happily ever after.

5. sometimes love is the lie we tell ourselves to sleep easier.

6. you never start loving someone with the intention of hurting them. but nobody mentions their best intentions and we’ve all gotta live with what we’ve ruined. you were the last thing about me that made sense. no one ever made sense to me the way you did.

7. i don’t know if i believe in love, but i believe in the lack of it. i write a lot about love, but i fear i do not understand it. tell me, what were you looking so hard for that i didn’t even make your line of vision?

8. beauty is so often a matter of perspective. leaving is so often a matter of perspective.

9. so everyone lives and everyone leaves and everyone dies eventually, we hang up pictures over the holes we punched in our walls. we move on.