It is Spring,
and you look at us,
take a picture
in the cherry blossom dress,
surrounded by your friends.

Summer nights
when you look at one of us in the bathroom,
grin and laugh at your drunkenness.
We smile back.

The leaves fall and you’re alone,
your breath fogs the glass in front of us
tears sliding down
“I'm dramatic”, you say.
If we could tell you something new,
it would be that we are there for you.

no one has seen you like we have,
checking your mascara
before your dates,
glancing in bathrooms when you feel overwhelmed,
before those college interviews,
sending pictures to the boys you like
that moment right before you cry.
Chin wobbling, lip teetering—

do not be afraid.
We are crying with you.

The sidewalk squares sure make life seem a game
As I watch the headlights filter through the trees
Walking on the dust of this week
Somehow, those upper room lights don't look the same

A life can be told from different angles
A different moral every time
A fresh perspective from greater distance
Puts the truth to familiar lies

Have you seen the mice all running, running in their wheel.
"Knowing" and "believing", what are delusions, to them is "real".
Rarely seeing other mice outside the wheel they're in.
Only time for thinking of keeping their own wheel on spin.
So happy and contented when they are spinning there.
So many trivialities that to them equal despair.
Keep the wheel a spinning, a spinning at a pace.
Never knowing that following circles just takes you to no place.
Mice ask me why I have no wheel and treat me as though I am lost.
I once did tread my wheel my delusions unable to sustain the cost.
Watching countless wheels without sense spinning on and on.
From beyond the wheel my delusions shattered, have now all gone.
Without a wheel there seems no purpose no reason to try and spin.
But once seen outside of wheels there seems no way to get back in.

I bought a brand new notebook.
With floral print and purple lines,
For the brand new school year,
To show them how I shine

But now it’s half way through the school year,
And my notebook has lost its glow,
It’s like as if my floral notebook,
Somehow really knows,

My mood and all my feelings,
And as I begin to age,
Like my floral notebook,
I seem tattered at every page.

When I reach the end of my notebook,
I fear what the story will hold,
Stripped of the words on the pages,
My heart soon growing cold.

I remember all the lessons,
And hope one day I understand,
That the stories in this notebook,
Are worth all the ink marks on my hand.