The world comes to me again with my sunlit room. A bird is nestled on the branch outside my window. My troubled-kitten sleep. The ceiling. The pictures in the cracks. My emptiness outside of school. Yes, divine is this space, for holy are the tears I’ve shed in it.

you will thrive in your own cocoon—
legless arthropod wriggling out
of its leaved shell, crunching
on the stem of a marigold’s shrivel.
you crawl up the leaves like they’re
the steps of a winding staircase,
circling and circling to one day
step out of your cocoon.

you are your own skin—
a wing ripped in figure
eights of formative tearing.
at the bottom of a
wind-leaned green tower,
you are torn down as if starting all
over again, away from the pace of
a hundred other caterpillar’d creatures.

you are not quite a monarch butterfly,
not yet the zebra-patterned black and white,
but you bloom in the form of a familiar marigold, a daisy’d curve—
thriving as a flower, swaying and alive.
you must visit the filial leaves and trace
their veins gently.

soon you will thrive in your own cocoon;
as those plant’d seeds will
soon leave legless arthropods wriggling—
for how would a caterpillar’s cocoon wither
without your leaves crinkling beneath it?

the strangeness of seventeen sets in as the seasons start to shift
i am stuck in the surreal stage of dwindling childhood and attempted adulthood
contradicting feelings being meshed into one disconcertingly dysfunctional body
i feel i am incapable of fully indulging in either my youth or my approaching adulthood
i feel i am incapable of being anything at all

the naïveté of nine has faded with the wood of my windowsill and i am no longer so sure of myself
pressures of eighteen loom in my future along with deafening doubts of
both my emotional and literal abilities to provide for myself
every morning i wake up in twisted bedsheets and wonder
whether teenage me is who i always hoped she’d be, or if something went wrong along
the winding road of change and growth and weak attempts to be better

so much i wish to do, so many ghosts of the past i wish to crush
haunted by the gloom i let in at such a young age, it never truly leaves me
i wish i could stop the clock from it’s monotonous tick-tick-ticking
and i wish i could stop the sun from disappearing beyond the foggy horizon
(i have so much to learn before night falls)

As I sit here on the bitter edge of seventeen
I daydream about the time the grass were green
I hate the way your love makes me act like a fein
Do you even think of me.