we grow up learning to fear love and how much it hurts to care for people and the older we get the more we see we were right to be terrified, we were right to fear life, and love, and loss, and it doesn't matter how tight you hold on; everything you love will slip through your fingers.
i promise my mind was never meant to be a playground for the wicked but you my dear have turned it into one. i always wanted the kind of love i dreamt about but i don't see you in my dreams anymore. i keep telling myself things have to turn around and get better eventually but the only thing turning is my stomach when i think of you.
i guess that in the end we are just breaking our own hearts hoping for a love we knew we could never have.

I walked past old, dead, trees
And into an old, abandoned park
I glanced at the huge, old tree
At the decayed bark

I returned my eyes to the playground
Then checked my watch
Five minutes till midnight
Then they will begin their march

I sat on an old, broken swing
Staring into the dark
Then there was that familiar ring
That rung throughout the park

I hid under the slide
So I couldn't be taken

Then they left
Leaving me to play
Momma would worry about my land of play

But I ignored that
Crawled out into the night
I sat on my swing
Looking in the dark
My midnight playground
Isn't as magical as it seems

A horrifying destination
That clouds my dreams
But I am cursed to forever find myself here

At the twelve hour
Terrifyingly dangerous
I forever walk alone
To my midnight playground
Since the age of three

Now I am thirteen
The monsters roam freely
I only depend on me
I can not leave this cursed place
Until the next night
But remains night as the moon holds still

I was forced to remove people by ****
But that was ten years ago
I do it on my own

This place disappears when I escape
It holds the remains of the bodies
Just to haunt my soul

I get called by its whispers
Telling me to follow
Then I find myself approaching
It's gate of the marrow

I hear this soft voice near my ear
Beckoning me to follow near
I hear it every night

But it doesn't give me fright
Every night I am more, and more temped to follow
But I am too tired to move

But tonight, I'll follow
Maybe it will leave me alone if I do

I slip out of my bed
Slightly rubbing my head

I follow it out to the woods
I don't think I should
But then I approach the old, abandoned park

What could have lead me
To this place in the dark

I check my watch and it's midnight
I'll call this park my Midnight Playground
My Playground in the dark

I learned my place quickly. See,
among the kids on the playground, I
was never fast. I was a joke among tag-players;
it is no exaggeration that I never tagged anyone.

But tag-you’re-it was the least of my worries.

I learned my place quickly, chased down
daily by a pack of boys from my class. To this day,
I couldn’t tell anyone what started it. I kept to myself:
They were wolves, and I was the rabbit they were hunting.
Run aground, pebbles kicked in my face; it was
just like the bullies in the cartoons—
But when it’s one little girl against six boys, I couldn’t find
the humour in it:
Cartoons like that didn’t make me laugh anymore.

I learned my place quickly. “Boys will be boys,”
Was the response from teachers when I came back inside:
crying, covered in dirt, shaking the pebbles out of my shirt.
“It just means they like you.” Yet I couldn’t grasp how
pushing me to the ground, kicking dirt and rocks into my face
equated to affection. If that was how boys acted then I
would rather die than have a boyfriend.

Their antics were validated on principle that they were boys,
and so their dominance in society was assured from day one.
The rest of us, the prey, had to deal with it; I would be sent to
The principal for this principle because I became desperate
and would hide in the woods just to get away.
I was reprimanded and shamed, while the boys got
a gentle slap on the wrist,
and a reminder:
“Play nice.”

I learned my place quickly.

In class the ******* and white tick-tock pinched
my mid-morning belly. When everyone else
borrowed numbers, my pencil lead and yellow paint
scratched out hunger. Minutes chugged like school
buses.  Even columns of three-numeraled numbers
minused the bottom line, scold of lunch.

A borrowed quarter and dime from the office,
meant a secretary’s red-lipsticked mouth, bent
and accusing.  Her coiffed curls shook my dreams.
I would starve before sailing into that office
for my little belly, but forever yearned for the secretary
to pet my hair. Say, “There, there,”like to a character
in a book rosy with girls in gingham dresses.

But, for all those lovely boats of hot lunches: meatloaf
with crusts of catsup like a winter cap, buttered beans,
dinner rolls
and cold-cartoned milk, not watered down--

Missing lunch,  I'd hide out in the cold storage
room of sack lunches next to the playground.
While the others ate, I'd escape at the right tick
into the recess of blacktop and tetherball.

Perhaps it’s the chemicals
In the mulch
Or the heat of the sun
Or that it’s Friday
But I want to grip monkey bars,
Just once

Hovering over
freshly baked plastic
and burn my ***
Or scream that I’m it and
slap some chubby bully kid-
run like the cool wind
Thank gosh I am quick.
Impress Kylie with my
Kickball Kick
Or cry on the swings-
the playground’s gallows,
When I learn she is moving

come the fall.

Leaves roll in,
dragged in waves across pavement
Queens of the universe
speed by
late for classes in some far off world where there is no recess

But my time
is kept
by bright bells
The clanging of metal,
distant shrieks,
Tall red beams and
lines of dumb ducklings.
It begins with a voice
And ends with a sliding slam of
a Silver Chrysler door
It is sustained by light thunder
Of feet pounding woodchips
Leaving dust in the seams of jeans
My mother bought me at Kohl’s last week.

You use my ribs as your monkey bars
To make your xylophonic melody
Tarzan would be proud, I'm sure
You're doing well at the expense of me
Perhaps I've got a playground heart
And that is what I am meant to be