When I was seventeen
I'd come home from school every day
and hope the house would be empty
so I'd have somewhere to pour into.
To pour all the things people
inadvertently filled me with

And all day long I defied the laws
of surface tension at the rim of my cup.
With nothing to hold them in, things
somehow just kept piling up.

I drove to school and when the faint
smell of gasoline met my eyes I
opened the windows until all the lies
were sliced away by the cold air.
What terrified me was that as it's coming
you can't see gasoline.

I breathed the freezing air in
and the gasoline out through the open window
and the passing cars said I dare
you to survive being this scared of
what you can't see.
Because people fill you up
past your brim without seeing
the way that your limbs are holding
things in place light years above that
little lip of water that can sit above the rim.

The headlights of the cars join in now
and they say you are not a cup.
How do I know if they're lying?
Headlights only show you what's right
before your eyes, and they expect you
to make the whole trip that way, farsightedly blind.
They say, you have so much tension that
you don't know what's yours and
what you pulled away from others
so you hold on to all of it and it
ever extends that little lip of water
that can sit above the rim.

And now the colored traffic lights chime in.
They say the irony of surfaces is that you
can't see what's inside because of them,
so if everyone is drowning beneath her own
surface tension you'll never know.
People are too hard to read.

I dare you to survive being this afraid
of what you can't see.