The year passed by in a blur
Of stress
And crying
And joy and laughing
And all the moments that signify teenage years
Are coming to an end and adulthood approaches.
That the safe cocoon of youth
Is no longer big enough for us
And even starts to reject us a little.
There are key moments picked out in my mind
Nights of sleeping next you in that high room
Cold mornings of your smile as we opened the front door to the frost
Days with tea and toast and hot chocolate
As we sat, sweaty from the afternoon
And laughing at silly things that only we knew.
Endless mornings draw together where we all sat in that hall
Me just apart from you all
And listened to inspiration
Or not,
Depending on the day,
But still we sat together.
And that last night
So uneventful as we all went our separate ways to bed
And the next day as we all got drunk together
In the walls that before had encased our childhood
We laughed and smiled and cried
And thanked god
And each other
For all those spectacular sights
Those days that made us giddy with hope and friendship
Those nights that made us weep and ache
With the pain of one another
Oh it was so glorious and so strange and so perfect,
That no words can really cover how grateful I am
To all of you,
the shepherds of my youthfulness.

All the *****-sprite infused nights
Hours spent before we finally hit the lights
The loud murmurs still pursuing the dark
And then we cursed the tipsy rusted spark

The rush when we stood on that roof-top railing
Stupidity dawned on us later, completely failing
But if I had to do it all over again hon'
I'd first say this is the stupidest idea ever
And then I'd jump the **** on.

Wondering back home on this lonely road
you're no where near , you're going far from here
i'll never see you again.
i'm trying to refrain from saying that
you're stuck in my brain.

i let you kiss my cheek before i left you
drown my teenage sadness
in sweet mountain dew
hearing typical advice  
"time will heal your broken wounds"
no one says how long it'll take though.

we all know you would've forgiven me
although i couldn't have forgiven you
i still wonder what made me mistrust you
but even today i still lust after you

i know why i left,
my mind was filled with sorrows
your words they seemed to borough
babe , you scared me and made me low
you were such a scarecrow.

today i weep, tomorrow i weep
*just please please please , stay happy and be sweet

there's a certain way some parts of the city
are covered in graffiti that's impossible to erase.
there's a certain way my parents never forget
to kiss my forehead at least once a day.
there's a certain way some gardener in the countryside
remembers to water his rosebeds every morning.
there's a certain way the waves
never leave the shore for any of the ocean's secrets.

and in those same ways,
i want you to never forget me.

A dialect
so different
that gargles from our gulping mouths
was formed in the teenage years
the gap between child and adult.
It was formed in between the steaming windows
of our first shared room
was wrought by the sticky fingers of our midnight-feasting.
It developed over time,
your African ancestors licking at the chocolate in your teeth
sharing mingled moments of warmth and sadness
with the carefree twang of my pacific past.
We lay together
your dark skin melting into mine
and over time
our throats sculpted their own language
as Babylonian linguists rejoiced
at the Genesis of us.

But over time
the grammar stumbled
and diplomacy broke between us,
and the shared bed of our childhood
was cracked open by the semantics of our youth.
My tongue clung to the dancing prose,
as if to return to the moment of our first embrace,
my sheets ached for the scent of your skin;
Arched back missing your equatorial warmth.
I gushed out words for you
Choking on damp notions of our shared past.
I tried to force in the commas
that married your phrase to mine;
straining to utter those sounds that were so sacredly ours .
But my verses had no meaning,
when the apostle lost all faith.

And then
one day
like breath returning to a body,
our dialect once again filled you
head to toe, heavy with the wet weight of love.
And just as before
you spilled into my arms
Our tongues mingled in a garbled kiss
Of language, more physical than my owns hands
clinging to your butter-skin.
I felt you breathing against my heart
heard whispered extracts of your internal litanies
drifting out through parted lips.
And I felt again
the mangled words
the beautiful drawl
This dialect, so definitely ours.

we had been mopping
the kitchen floor all day
and the dirt never
stopped coming back

and earlier we had sprayed
the entire front porch
down with the garden hose
and now it was still wet
which made it feel as if
it had recently rained when in fact
the grass was a crunchy
brown carpet of regrets.

the night before we had
drunk orange smoothies
laced with lime and something
aged sleek and dark

(i think it must have been
the reason we couldn't
sleep that night
lay awake in my parents bed
and i told you why i
wouldn't go swimming
until the sun rose
the dog barked
the birds screamed
their morning songs
and my body stopped its
nightly spasms of fear.)

and the next evening
we put on a miranda lambert song
(the one we drank to
in your mother's van last winter)
sat on the wet
porch swing
and cracked open
our first beers

they were
really bad
i gagged
because it tasted
like carbonated
banana bread with
too much stale
baking soda
and we poured half of them
into the flower beds

the next morning
was sunday
and we had milk and muffins
in the kitchen with
simon and garfunkel
then went back out to the porch
drank iced coffee in the
eleven o'clock sunlight
and you said
"if this were a normal sunday
i would have been up at six
at church by eight
and done teaching my first
sunday school class by ten."

(is beer as much
of an acquired taste
as coffee is?
because i can't ever
remember not liking it
i used to think it was
bitter but i always
liked it anyway.)

i didn't say anything
because i didn't want to
say what was on the tip
of my tongue
that this kind of sunday
had become my normalcy
and our variety of saturday night
no longer felt like underage
drinking and more like
the way i was meant to be.