When we write stories about an apocalypse, it is usually because we are living through one.

No zombies this time

But someone had to light the first match

And someone has to raise earth

From its flattened ashes.

When the destroyers,

the children of dissatisfaction grieve this place,

will it feel sorry for us?

When the world starts over, who will hold its calloused tongue until its first word is something greater  

than  “more”  

and its first taste is something more limitless

than sky

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.

Lights under the train station, find your way home tonight. Sometimes sundown and sunrise doesn’t make things right.
I stop to tie my shoe, and hear a man with a gray sweatshirt, hood up, yell like the traffic and the city lights are gonna drown him out.
“You got change?” It takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me.
“You got change, sweetheart?” He asks me for coins, crumbs from the table of dollar bills. I reach for my wallet and hand him a green single. He looks at it like I rained cash on the desert.
Yeah, I got change. I got it electrocuting out of my fingertips. I got it locked up in my mind with all the would-have-been’s beckoning to be set free.
I got change under my bed with the shoes I put on in the morning, shoes I tie even on days I feel like numbing everything with sleep.
I got change in every stutter, every repetition of my too-quiet voice,
These veins are swollen with change. These brains are wishing for us to stop acting like everybody on the sidewalk with nowhere to be is just part of the concrete.
“Have a good day,” says the man, already turning away. He doesn’t say you’re welcome, but I know I am. I’m a part of these streets, no questions in city or from the ***** trucks, no comments from the puddle flooded subway stairs.
“Have a good day,” he said, but it’s night, and I find myself waiting for the train during the grace period between the 5:35 and the 6:02.
Change is in the people-watching, the night owls, the ones working long days to feed families, the ones waking long nights to feed their psyches.
Yeah, I got change, it’s right in front of me.
A kid in a black sweatshirt, hood up, kicks a penny around the train platform, a sliver of dollars that aren’t worth anything until you need them to be.
I wonder if time is his greatest asset. I think it’s resilience that brings him home.
Lights under the train station, find your way home tonight. Sometimes sundown and sunrise doesn’t make things right.
Two trains line the platform, one inbound, one outbound, a screeching symphony of commuter rail and commuter. They won’t cross again tomorrow. I hop on the jam packed purple line and wonder what we could do if more people knew they got change.
Change is in the sky. It’s gonna rain coins into all our pockets and I’ll be catching droplets.
Lights under the train station, find your way home tonight. Sometimes sundown and sunrise doesn’t make things right.
This place is rundown and the train’s packed tight
But we all got change and we’re gonna be alright.

I can’t say that we go anywhere when we’re gone
That said, have you ever stood somewhere where everything washes up? Everything lost, everything left, everything broken
The ocean is not endless, no
Endless means forgotten
The ocean is everything
When something falls in, it rides the currents for as long as it takes to get somewhere.
Somewhere might be sinking, or in a fish’s gut, on the great Pacific garbage patch or on a little island
If you want to know how to get there I’ll ask you if you know the neighbors
Everything washes up there
Everything lost, everything left, everything lingering
Lobster pots
Shredded lines (the ocean holds all barriers)
Broken buoys (everything that floats, floats forever)
Seagull bones
Cans and bottles
Even rudders
There are stories of how tractor beach got its name:
There was once a whole tractor that washed up on its shores
Gears, wheels, engine, rusted metal (all things lost are not all things forgotten).
Pieces of it are long since buried in the rocks and mussel shells
But the ocean has parts of it somewhere
The ocean has parts of us, somewhere.
The ocean has parts of the seagulls and their wiry legs
Or the murky tidepools (even when we are left behind we are still ocean).
If planets were marbles the earth would be the only blue sphere in the whole pile
The ocean is the universe’s blue moon
One day a tractor came through one of its portals to an island
Heaven is a doubt, but perhaps heaven is Tractor Beach: a place where everything washes up. Where the egrets perch dreamlike above beach roses and sumacs. Where gulls kneel by broken eggs in nests of rocks. Where trash is treasure is the legend of a tractor in tide. A legend of escape, a place to float away, and a view like no other. What else could we need after life?

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.

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.

And when all the bright lights fade, there'll still be stardust in her veins

It is running through her. She needs no blood for then she would have something to shed. A snake sheds skin, a butterfly sheds chrysalis and caterpillar alike, the things in metamorphosis it needs no longer. A dandelion seeds. But it does not shed

It waits for someone to blow, whether breath of a human or breath of the wind or just the breadth of time and gravity

She is the stars’ dandelion, a night gazer

We’re all made of stardust you know

But in our mental light pollution of darkness, we lose ourselves

She sees carousels of knowledge swirling with fear, in an iridescent delicacy that only comes with ideas that aren’t and will never be tangible.

How big is the ocean? How big the sky, the earth, the universe? How far out can we go, but also how far in?

If every night she lit a lantern, the night sky would sing for them. The trees would catch them. They would sparkle even in absence of the moon.

One day they go out, light no longer

Today is that day

She is

Stifled

And just so small

But when all the bright lights fade, there'll still be stardust in her veins

My breathless mind runs in circles
I bike laps around the roof of the parking garage as the sun goes down
It’s too loud for a quiet town
The clouds look back at me colored like a Renaissance painting
The concrete frame’s got pain and no window pane
I play gunshots or fireworks
And ride home to my white suburbia perks
Is this my first Renaissance?
I hope not the last
I’m overwhelmed by the ambiance
The ground pushes back and the concrete slips
And I’m too out of breath to reach the city’s loudest taunts
The steeples rebuild and the plywood sits
The streetlights blink and the tree trunk rips
The train comes north at an alarming sound
And I pray to any God that there's no body on the ground.

Punk kids, instead of having choreography or jumping up and down with hands in the air,
Punk kids knock, bounce and rattle against each other like broken glass in a bag or pin ***** in the most complicated machine,
I hate loud noise but I love loud music as long as I have my headphones
Back and forth, headbanging until the noise from our heads comes out those ringing ears
Nervous tics to music
Stress made into a party
Rocking out, rocking ourselves forward and back
Just like I do when I'm overwhelmed
Catching or reaching a hand to anyone who knocks themself down
Loose limbs and heads slack
Hands and feet across the crowd are literally twitching,
It's a monster mash looking, skeleton disco.
Some kids look possessed but they're okay with that
No one's worst demons can get in because the venue's at full capacity,
The window-watchers chase any evil spirits into the snow,
Fear and worry leave for one set because they can't stand the racket,
The rest of the day got lost in all the cables and pedals,
I bounce against kids in chains and band t shirts,
Hardly need to use my eyes,
My shoes are covered in Doc Marten footprints and people shove me and I shove them right back and I don't need to say anything in the huge mess that is the mosh pit
The room is full of people moving like zombies on a sugar high whose brains are being eaten by the music,
For a while, we let that happen.
When the final set ends
My neck and feet are sore like the speakers and amps were a workout you can buy from Guitar Center,
Headbanging is my favorite kind of cardio,
And moshing is my favorite catharsis.
The silence is everywhere as the punks exit the Scene.
I hardly know any of these people by name.
But we just performed one strange, scene kid dance
For the night to watch
When I go to bed my legs spasm
I think because
they are still dancing

Some lexicon you got there, kid, some funny picks you choose from the lot you were taught, some things you spit that I look for and just aren’t there

Why do you need poetry and bloviation to tell your story? What aviation, fight or flight does that give you, burrowing your meaning in storms of complexity

Does it do you no work to simplify

See a problem, rectify it

Why do you look at a shoelace and untie it

Unlace the strands of humanities patterns like the peel of an orange

The earth is one big orange

And we flatten it like a piece of paper

Superheros were given capes so that in flat spaces, they fly

Why do you try to weigh yourself down with salty slabs of thoughts you cry?

What is it about the look in that eye the cooks you so hot you break like clay in kiln your eyes see a film in everything

It’s all a deep surround sound movie

And to you, it’s so rewarding to blink in your real-time recording

Camcorder on board with the lines you drew dragging your sneakers in the dirt

It’s random like that but it’s raw and dries like glue- clear, but smells like something manmade and stuck together

And there’s noise around you, however, whatever overstimulation annoys you, you are not alone

People will notice you and say,

Who’s this?

Did he drown?
Did he hit the ground?
Did he take flight again
Like a goose gone south for longer
Than a winters night?
Daedalus should’ve done a practice flight

Did he laugh?
Did he throw his head back?
Did he let himself fall
And with a smile on his face
Feel peaceful fright?
Needing less discipline to fall than to take flight

Did he make it up as he went?
His finale waiting for the sun’s repent?
Did Daedalus drop his maps and designs
Did even the sea reach out from the benign
To say, the sun shines awfully bright
You should’ve done a practice flight

Hell is shaped for the hand of a wishful, foolish painter
Its caverns wait for us to paint over the mistakes again
And again
And again the walls become crude and rough under the layers of our harm.

I was on the brick and cobblestones one afternoon, among groups of wishful oppressors, their hands clenched in dried paint. They ask how to scrub it off. They’ve heard “Black Lives Matter” but they don’t know where, or when.
It’s here, and now, and everywhere, and always.

Hell is shaped like my young metatarsals, creaking and aching under some unrealized purpose.
Hell is shaped like a ladder that my ancestors soaked in lighter fluid
And waited for everyone else to scramble up.

Hell is shaped like venom tongues and weapons alchemied in colonialism’s genocide. It’s also shaped like disposable responsibility and eyes that stray from the fire and like greed in the flag with nails in the palm.

I was brought up in a stolen, and false, but beautiful and loving safety. I would give my sense of direction to let someone else’s baby have a memory of swimming the meters from one parent to the other in the shallows if the ocean– so small, so humbled, but so, so safe.

I was in a park when I had to write a lawyer’s defense fund number on my forearm. A cop car trailed our peaceful protest like an unwanted lantern. I am grateful, but maybe not well-deserved, to say that is the most scared I’ve ever been.

Hell is shaped like too-loose strings on an old guitar. No matter the harmonic chord, there will always be dissonance in the punishment of created evils.

I was not raised to believe in hell. I’ve been told by the outlying sign that it waits for me. I still think it is a metaphor. I wave my rainbow flag and breathe through my white skin. I am kneeling to be knighted by my moms and waiting to pull up those lying down. But I can’t reach for Dominique or Layla or Brayla or Tony or Muhlaysia or any of the names I’ve been burdened to forget because they are not here. I can’t reach for Michael, or Emmitt, or Breonna, or George, Ahmaud, Daunte, Eric, Sandra, Toyin, Trayvon, Elijah, or Moses.

Hell is shaped like a twisted funeral florist. It makes me want to scream, “God, let me have enough arms and energy to hold as many flowers as I can”, because I need to give them out while everyone is still here.

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.

Get us on a train to Brooklyn
Neath the ***** subway stairs
Let's leave this rain and foot traffic
Times Square is for the go-getters
We are the finders keepers
We are wanderers.
In stores out stores.
But we don't buy
Streets, streets again,
Puddles
Rain washes out the concrete jungle in filthy puddles
Just another tourist obstacle
Inside a pizza place
I sit
And draw the raindrops bouncing off the concrete
One day I'll take a train to Brooklyn
Get deeper lost in someplace new
Where the streets make better art

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.