My 12th Grade English Teacher Cries and Says, “You’re Going to End Up on Button Poetry”
by jfrank0816
I am almost twenty-three & her gentle prophecy has yet to come true
My curiosity gets the best of me and I browse through my old musings
I was so...seventeen.
My warped understanding of love with a twenty six year-old man
(predator)
whose sheets I still find myself lost in from time to time.
Fights with my father were mountains
& I was climbing to the apex of his approval,
always just short before backsliding.
Okay, so I guess things haven’t changed that much.
Maybe the five year mark of graduating high school
makes me long to have accomplished something that feels worth this living
I spent so much time hating myself for.
I worry my poems will sound so...22 in five years
marked by smoking too much weed & trying to outdo myself
with tenderness.
Even if I hate my now poems someday,
they serve as prepackaged memories
disguised as metaphors.
As parts of my trying to fall into rain,
unchanged & stop apologizing.
I feel my body’s accomplishments already.
Making it out alive counts.