Spiders spin in my sleep
webs wrapping wishes
into secure spheres.
I'll throw them across time.
Maybe mayhem
can carry cravings
far from fantasy.

I guess mushroom swiss burgers
are supposed to have mushrooms.
THEY ARE NOT supposed to have
lettuce, tomato, or pickle.
ONLY mushroom and swiss.

The angry and life deprived woman I was looking
down at sternly informed me.

Her burger was rapidly fixed.

The friendly, quiet, and easy table to the left
tipped me eight dollars for my troubles.

There are some good people.
It all comes out in the wash.

Like a golden tree ornament
or an orange bouncy ball.
Spherical, super blood wolf, unbelievable.
You could toss it around in the sky.

We sat on tarps over snow and ooed and awed.
We passed around the binocs.
The only earthly trouble was the minor
frostbite which seeped into our toes.
We saw the total eclipse of the moon.

I think it's so cliche
that you assume we disagree

when my grandma cut my hair
she told me sometimes
she gets the urge to run
outside and
tape all the leaves back on the trees

my friend Jill cut off most her hair
and when I saw her
I thought:
this is it
we're all growing up

today my grandma told me something
something I never knew
and something she'd never forget
she told me I was baptized in tie dye socks
tiny little feet
tiny little socks
baptized in tiny little tie dye socks

That night I told you to find your own ride home
because I had better plans.
Plans that didn’t involve driving you back
after the high school dance

I wish I had taken you home.
We would’ve slipped off our shoes and laid across the bed.
When you opened your phone
to read the texts that burned your eyes,
I would’ve held your hand.

Even though you slide on a pretty dress,
and squeeze into a pair of heels,
bad news still slides it’s way down cheeks
carrying dark lines of mascara.

Tears don’t mean anything,
it’s the silence that stings.
The same silence that wrapped around
her neck ropes under your bedroom door,
slipping through pink glossed lips,
until you can’t breathe anymore.

Earlier that night we danced together
when your feet were still light as air.
Later on you found your own way home,
and lay wide awake, different from before.

She slides in her headphones.
The cart is filled of freshly read books,
the lucky ones with their pages recently turned,
gently pushed to the upstairs stacks.

Beyond the glass door lies
the world of words. Walls
encase countless characters,
stories that needed to be told.

And now the room belongs to the girl
with the music that lifts her from shelf to shelf
bringing each book back to where it belongs
from her tiptoes to her knees.
Her eyes erode the call numbers
while lyrics and numbers fill her head.

On the bright days a little hip hop has her
dancing down strings of shelves.
Other times she selects slow songs
and imagines the books are a part of her:
the early memories, destined dreams, the everyday thoughts.

Thoughts that thread through the stacks.
She tries to tuck them away before they’re lost
and wishes they could also be
placed so particularly in her mind.