Under the starry skies and the colder days, in streets lined with wrappers of Milky Ways,
Ledger lines are sidewalk cracks accentuating where the high notes are,
Hiding who the ones on the low roads are,
Shade of broken twigs too light to block rain,
Frost on the ground not thick enough to show from whence footprints came.
Electric fence invisible from self defense, next door the front yard full of rocks hides pebbles of gold,
The golden geese flew south but the wind came and told all the weathervanes that there was something in this urban forest of junk and lost dreams.
This way, they pointed, down from the north comes a city winter for this city autumn.

This is what youth tastes like.
Starburst candies and milk from a school carton.
Gossip on the tongues of desk neighbors
Tote bags next to backpacks next to gym bags
Feet
One two
Skip three
Tiles under Adidas
Nike and Vans
UGG boots and their less name-brand counterparts
Moccasins, for the ones with sleep still in their eyes
Slides but no flip flops
They all walk
Or just sit
In the possibility of motion to a future life
This is phase one
And the sun is still bright outside
Even in rooms without windows.
Forbade wear headphones
But someone always does
And either blasts it so loud
That all you can hear is high hats
Or plays the music out in the open
Like the hallway is a concrete concert hall
We call this place hell but,
I don’t know if I want to leave this place.

I heard a rumor that hope still lives somewhere inside you.

The night is a thrilling time in every sense of the word, and you are proud to be a child of this time.

I heard a rumor that you write by the light of the moon and the fluorescents of your bedroom.

Carpe noctum- seize the night. Latin. The flip side of the more commonly used “carpe diem”; in any case, a mantra.

I heard a rumor that you wish on stars for things that feel even further away.

I heard you have an exhausted but insomniac body that needs to be something’d to sleep.

I heard you want to create things, go someplace.

I heard a rumor that you will get there.

Things tired teenagers do, aside from the aforementioned stereotypes awkwardly assigned to the not-yet-adult generation:

1. Wait. Wait, lonesome for dreams when not sleeping. Lonesome for dreams of purpose, because there are still dreams of "what I want to be" in these years, but more so fear of how to get there;

2. Listen. Listen to the sounds of outside weather, of sleeping family members. Listen to thoughts, anxiety and responsibilities, memes and song lyrics, words they haven't formed yet and words that don't exist yet;

One of the thoughts is always "I should". "I should be asleep", "I should work harder", "I shouldn't try so hard", "I should keep climbing, life is uphill, but I feel like I'm slipping". "I should sleep".

"I'll sleep, soon."

3. Run free through open mind fields of creativity and realizations. It is when you are growing up, growing smarts like leaves, and still young that the world is truly your oyster; a teenager knows well enough that an oyster looks like an oyster does in its rough, brown shell, but still possesses the fascination and inexperience to widen their eyes in surprise at the sight of a pearl.

Teenage brains are like sponges; they absorb everything. But sponges are soft, flexible, squeezable, and can sop up all the world's mess, changing color as to absorb the spill.

4. Laugh. Make self-deprecating jokes. Dive into confusing, humorous, daunting pools of internet information, tweets of terror, memes of celebrities, photos of death, all the information and laughs and secondhand trauma a person never asked for, that a teenager has grown into.

4. Wish that sleep would come as easy as in days past. Wish that the world were as simple as it in the past. Complications make a person lose focus, but what is a person to focus on in an uncomplicated world?

Wish harder for something to become while the body finally gets its wish of sleep.

I filled my mouth with lace and purple violets
A cocoon of sleep dust, willow wisps and babies' laughs
I held my breath and saved my words so I could watch them hatch
Looking in the mirror for eggshell cracks on my skin
And one night while I was sleeping a crowd of tiny butterflies burst out of me
I dreamed they carried me off with them but when I woke up I was still lying here.
“Good morning,” I said to no one in particular. There was no answer, and there were no tiny winged creatures to carry me off.