You
           2. Monsters under the bed
      3. Being alone in the dark
           4. Spiders

5. I have to be medicated to appear even
                                                     remotely ordinary
          6. Being followed
     7. Tiny holes in leaves
          8. Feeling calories go down my throat

9. Strong men and greasy boys
         10. *You

I need to write a letter, in curling cursive blue,
and mail it to me, it doesn't matter what the words say
I just want to see them scrawled on the page, to remind me
I am seventy minus eight, and my symmetry in script
is increasingly askew

I know this
when I press ******* the pen,
when I fold the paper, lick the envelope,
and drop it in the blue metal world where its flat life
commingles with strangers until it comes back to my red and white box,
into my black and white life, where the average of the two is gray,
the growing, groping color of my beard,
and the hair on my heaving chest.

I need not even open it to know I have forgotten
what secrets I writ...the name and address suffice,
showing me not who I be or where I be, but how slanted and sloping
my world has become, no matter how vainly I endeavor to keep things straight,
of late, and more tomorrow, my dysgraphic lines
tell the truer tale, in the simple scribbled letter
I wrote to me

The smoke rises
and soon the stars in the sky look like coordinates
and you count the way each set of three makes a triangle.
This view makes you feel happy that you're still stuck in the suburbs
but then you begin to feel scared because you're still stuck in the suburbs
(maybe the view is better elsewhere)
I miss my best friend
and I know that if I lean over this balcony any further -  I'll be dead.
Suddenly you're glad you aren't dead.
and suddenly you're scared because you could be.

I liken our young teenage writers here to rose buds
Then visualize those rose buds in full bloom