You are running through the woods
and the simple act of breathing reminds you
that you alone
are not whole.
You have a gnawing urge
a shaking, painful need
to intake breathe. Your lungs
are hollow and you cannot exist
without the aid of the thundering world that surrounds your body.
Leaves rustle at your feet but there is nothing alive within them;
it is spring, but still early in the season,
all of the branches of the trees hang limp and bare and gray and cold.
Everything is quiet
and only slightly sweet smelling--
you are reminded that your life,
however vaguely synonymous with your soul,
is the fire of a candle
goldish-yellow
fragile
flickering
and nestled tightly between your vital organs,
sprouting delicately out of your aorta,
and homed only by your ribcage.
You probably think that it is an overly generic metaphor,
but I am going to use it anyway.
You are reminded that although this earth takes in the carbon dioxide you exhale and in return seeps life into you
at the pace of a heartbeat,
one sudden violent shudder
could take it all away.
And I don't want to be alone.
I am reminded that this poem
is supposed to be about you.
But hey,
who cares,
I'll take everything sweet and powerful and pretty and deep and
spin it into something of a self-portrait.
It doesn't matter how messy or wordy or nonsensical it is, I can just slap an Instagram filter on it and call it good.
Because according to people who aren't us,
that's what my generation does.
But I do not think that technology is shameful.
Maybe the internet gave me Stockholm syndrome,
but hey, I don't care,
I like it.
I do not understand the resent towards everything modern,
like:
selfies,
iPhones,
social media,
the polio vaccine,
the spread of legal marriage equality,
or the continuous, grappling, and rejuvenated fight against institutionalized racism
(something our predecessors never could quite stomp out).
We are a candlelight
that can never be put out.
God graced me with 20 million nerve endings
(I know because I googled it)
and a whole heap of flickering atoms
running from my fugly toes to the tips of jittery fingers
so that I may feel
and express myself.
I'll be ****** if I take that for granted.
This is the New Romanticism--
penned out with two hammering thumbs on a touch screen.
Hell, maybe I'm the new Nietzsche.
Everything that I can experience
has the potential to be beautiful.
From pointless technological meandering
to the raw and flourishing earth that brushes up against my skin.
It is all worthy of note for it comprises the miraculous euphoria that is human nature and
human life.
Maybe everything that I write
and feel
and think
and experience and
believe in is all petty and for naught
because I am a teenage girl
and nothing but.
However,
the universe at chance collided altogether in a smash to bring about a world that sustains my very individual personal life,
and mankind created laptop computers,
so if even miracles are possible,
I'd like to be a little more optimistic than that.
But this isn't a poem about that.
This is a poem about running
and breathing and living
through the woods
with you.
Not escaping, not fleeing, just running
and believing and being.
I think we're going to make it.
I think we're going to make it just fine.