What did I do with my glasses?
I had them a minute ago
They’re always disappearing
I don’t know where they go

My eyes don’t focus without them
Now that me youth has gone
One of the things I’ve learned is
You don’t stay young very long

I waste so much time just searching
Can anyone tell me where?
I could be being useful
Or having a kip in the chair

I asked my wife to help me
With a roll of her eyes she said
Try where your hair used to be dear
They’re on the top of your head

Where is my Lil Sister? I saw her walking to school. I hear her silent whispers.  " I'm gone too soon! "
Mom drove to the store, and she didnt return. We still wait like always, with desperate heartburn.

OUR INDIGENOUS WOMEN ARE MURDERED AND MISSING!
North America and O Canada, No one cares to listen
So to our tribal Matriarchs, we say "Do  nada*."

Auntie walked into the woods, she wanted to get an herb.
Now we go where she stood, she hasnt been seen or heard.
Who took them away and why? We mourn their disappearance.
We ask Mother Earth and Father Sky for our Intertribal quest prominence.

Until they leave no more, and we stomp grass again together,
Our Sacred feminine core, Turtle Island's own precious Flower.

I’ve always loved music. As a little girl, I could spend hours going through peoples CD collections, sampling them with my little battery-operated CD player. If you showed me a stack, rack or box of CDs, I was in heaven.

When I was 8 (2011), I got my first iPod for Christmas, an iPod Touch with 32GB of memory! The sticker said it was from Santa, but ‘Step’ got a package in the mail from Apple three weeks earlier, so I knew who it was really from. Upon opening it, I rushed upstairs to my older brother’s computer, plugged it in, carefully copied the username and password for the family iTunes account (from a wrinkled post-it note), and the world was never the same.

It never occurred to me that my parents could see all of my playlists and that they were automatically downloaded to their devices - like my break-up playlist, inspired by Antoine, my French-boy fifth grade crush. It didn’t work out because he didn’t have an email account and our recess times didn’t line up, but my playlist helped me through it.

I could burn playlists to CDs and exchange them with friends - or gift them to middle school boys who I hoped to amaze with my awesome musical tastes. There’s an art to the playlist that involves controlling pace and mood - every playlist was both a gift and a seduction.

Today we have Spotify with its unlimited streaming of every song ever made - on demand. Exchanging playlists, these days, is as easy as pressing "Share" and typing the first few letters of a friend’s or lover's username.

Like most of my girlfriends, I consider myself a playlist queen and as I continue to work this career path I’ve chosen, regardless of what's weighing me down, I know I can turn to my playlists to push me through. The band ‘The Narcissist Cookbook ’ assures me that my shocking honesty is fun with ‘Broken People.’ ‘K. Flay’ allows me to dance-out my rage with ‘Blood in the cut’ and ‘New Move’ motivates me to keep-at-it with ‘When did we stop.’

I’ve countless Spotify playlists: one for waking up, one for writing papers, one for doing problem sets, others for walking to class, doing the laundry, for nostalgic reflection, and for embracing the astounding depth of human pain.

Of course, as time passes, I find new favorite songs and older playlists are replaced with updated ones; but thanks to the archival nature of Spotify playlist collections, all my old lists remain intact. I’ve never deleted one. Search my archives and you’d see playlists from my freshie year, when I was new here, feeling insecure and alone, or from my sophomore year when I first fell in love.

This piece is a playlist love story, about how music reflects our identities and allows us to share ourselves through the vibes, melodies and beats that move us. I think playlists have a lot in common with poetry, which uses words, phrases, metaphors and imagery for similar purposes.