I stood between my father's fist
and my brother
dared to say the words
hit me instead
you know it's what you want
bulging red eyes
and a thousand-mile stare
17
and bravely standing up
to my lifelong bully
and at that moment
I reclaimed my value
he knew I was no longer scared

Eyes are the window to the soul,

But what if,

You don't have one of those?

She sat on a park bench crying at the moon
Because that's what wolves do
And wolves were a lot closer to her than family
He lied under a park bench
And spoke to the ants
Because ants were more like friends than any friends he'd ever had
And once upon a time
These two were children full of innocence
Full of vigor and life ready for anything
Like anything was the everything they did everyday
And this is an ode to lost innocence
But I'm not sure he's lost
We may have just forgotten where to find him
Or maybe he forgot where he lives
And right now he's wandering the streets
Finding refuge in anyone willing to dream when the sun is out
Our children are seeing things like they live in the third world
They're spending their days providing
For families their fathers left them
Watching gun shots count for the census
Seeing thriving turn in to surviving
And surviving turning in to not even worth it anymore
Our mothers can't afford gifts for Christmas
And sometimes they can't even buy their kids imagination for breakfast
We have kids knowing their **** hands
Before their clock hands
Surprising their math teachers
With their extraordinary knowledge of ounces and grams
Innocence has been gone for a while
So I put up missing posters on the same telephone poles
Those once innocent children sell themselves on
I place fliers in the newspapers
The teenagers are rolling their **** in
I'm searching for him everywhere
And I'm starting to believe he's nowhere
Then I see an old man
Who's been through his share of this war
Looking at a painting with eyes I once had
Admiring the image, not the brush strokes
Loving the feeling it provokes
Not the conflict it's trying to resolve
And I see in him the innocence that's lost
But it doesn't stay long
His cell phone rings and he hunches over
As if no matter who it is, it's the real world
And the weight of that is crushing him
So I crawl under the same park bench
And pray to the same moon
The young woman cried to
And I ask the man in the moon to save us
To use his huge eyes to find the innocence
And put it back in talking to ants
And howling at the moon
Convince them to leave the straight jackets
In empty padded rooms
And let the children we were
We are
We never got the chance to be
Run free
This is an ode to lost innocence
To lighters and cigarettes in the lost and found
To Anti Depressants in the nurses office
And Ex-Lax in the girls bathroom
They used to have four square and hopscotch courts
Now the only chalk on sidewalks is outlining a corpse
Explaining to our kids about pregnancy and STD's
Before we teach them the infield fly rule
This is an ode to the innocence that ran away
Because maybe he's not lost at all
Maybe he's just sick and tired of being ripped out of people
Of being ***** out of young girls
Beaten out of young children
Shot out of young boys
Maybe innocence just got tired of being taken for granted
About not being loved like poets used to love him
You don't see his name in too many hip hop songs
And I haven't heard a poem in a while to call his praise
Maybe he left to go try and find somewhere
He can be loved like he used to be
He could be courting aliens
Or wooing dolphins
Because it's clear we don't care about him anymore
That innocence got lost without us noticing
So why would we notice if he came back
So why should he come back
This is an ode innocence's last name
Children
This is an ode to lost innocence
The cops came and took her away
And before her head was tucked into the car
She howled one last time at the moon
And from my balcony as loud as my lungs could let me
I howled back
And the next day I crawled under a park bench and talked to ants
A week later I found myself howling at the moon
Because it seemed the whole block
Caught a case of insomnia the day they arrested the wolf lady
This is an ode to lost innocence
Please come home, our children need you

the snow is as still as silence
our fingers intertwine;
but not in the way i aspire

we drank raspberry liquor
we ate strawberry ice cream
and we danced in closed down bars
the night that i left you
yet when we kissed, my darling
your lips were like vanilla
and all i could think, all i could wonder
was how to chase winter in the summer night air

Fading away
Like tears in the rain
My mind used to act like a shadow that hides when its late
I wandered through dreams
With no escape to be seen

But since I met you
The rain no longer teems
It still falls
But its softer
Like your lips on my cheek

I am in love with you
More than I could ever explain
Tonight let us meet in the depths of our dreams