from a young age I was
manipulating them
making them mine
playing them over and over
letting them use me
but really I was using them
then tossing them out
to move on to the next

more and more and more
ripping them off the page
tearing apart the ignorant ones
making passionate sense to them
and spitting them back out
fingers digging in like quotation marks
burning them into parts of speech
adjectives, nouns, verbs
taking advantage of them all
I'm an equal opportunist