#seventeen
Everyone says I’m lucky.
Seventeen.
Whole life ahead of me like a hallway
with too many doors.
My grades are fine.
My parents aren’t yelling.
I’ve got friends, plans for Friday,
a phone that lights up when I check it.
Nothing’s wrong enough to complain about.
That’s what I tell myself
when my chest feels tight for no reason
in the middle of math class.
I laugh loud in the cafeteria.
I post like I’m supposed to.
I know all the right answers
except why I feel empty
when I’m not supposed to.
Adults say this is the best time.
No real problems yet.
But every night my thoughts get heavy,
like they’re trying to grow up faster than me.
I feel guilty for feeling bad.
Like I’m wasting something important.
Like happiness is a class
I’m skipping on purpose.
I don’t want anything terrible to happen.
I don’t want attention.
I just want to understand
why being okay feels so exhausting.
Everything’s good.
That’s the problem.
Because if this is fine,
why do I still feel like
I’m failing at being seventeen?
Jan 8
Jan 8, 2026 at 1:06 PM UTC
Think about your future, she said
I'm seventeen right now
In five years I'll be twenty-two
My life in five years
Imagine your life in five years
If you continue down this route
She told me it's not a matter of 'if'
It's a matter of 'when'
When it catches up to me
But it won't catch up
I'm seventeen right now
Living my life as I want it to be
May 16, 2025
May 16, 2025 at 6:03 PM UTC
understand the pain you hide,
The way you keep it locked inside.
You push away, afraid to fall,
But still, I love you through it all.
Your heart may doubt, your mind may race,
But in your eyes, I see a trace.
A love that’s real, a love that’s true,
And I will stand right here with you.
Though you retreat, I’ll never leave,
In every storm, in every grieve.
I see the scars, I feel your fight,
But I’ll keep loving through the night.
So don’t be scared, don’t push me away,
I’ll love you more with each new day.
I understand, but know this too—
My heart will always wait for you.
Nov 19, 2024
Nov 19, 2024 at 9:52 PM UTC
seventeen back then
meeting you is not what I yenned
late nights and fights we spent
sweetest dreams i've been
Aug 15, 2024
Aug 15, 2024 at 7:30 AM UTC
Kindest boy with a library that
reached the ceiling and
the same personality as
my best friend, they would talk about
movies in the middle of the street at
three a.m.
Everyone wanted us
to end up together but
it would never work out
in the end.
Moody boy with dark circles
that rimmed his eyes, always
wanted to talk about romance.
He looked at me with the softest eyes
but couldn't hold a conversation to
saves his life.
I don't know why but
I always think about him
when I'm feeling bright and
blue.
- dates at seventeen.
Jul 29, 2020
Jul 29, 2020 at 5:14 PM UTC
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The blood fills our hearts and rushes
through every crevice of our bodies.
One. Two. Three.
We breathe in unison as our hearts travel
And our thoughts diverge into particles,
bright as the stars, but strong as my heart.
My cold and bruised cheek makes love
with your warm and red cotton shirt.
Eyes closed, I take a leap of faith.
Failed me before, I cross my fingers and jump.
I fall into your arms and dissolve into you.
Engulfed by the stench of your sweat,
the warmth of the skin baptized me.
Swish. Our skin mingles like newlyweds.
Honeysuckle. Honeydew. You’re sweet.
I miss you.
The sun tattoos the red you give me,
a reminder of a week on Calypso’s island.
Emerald and pearlite. Eyes that enchant.
Your freckles make Bermuda’s triangle
a perfect landing point.
So safe but so unknown. Mary Magdalene
No wonder I fall, you are gravity.
Bring me down to earth. Away from the
Burning sun. Apollo rapes Artemis.
As he prophets my fate. Poetry.
I ignore the stars and their cries,
as together here and now, I am infinite.
Soaring like a bird on ecstasy. I believe.
A crusade brings me to faith. Love.
Jul 28, 2020
Jul 28, 2020 at 6:10 PM UTC
Even during quarantine
Sometimes hanging out with friends
On the one day of the year
That celebrates YOU
Can be the world
Jul 9, 2020
Jul 9, 2020 at 12:57 PM UTC
are you seventeen yet?
have the berries and the shells
stained impossibly
your youthful heart permanent,
have you matured and learned
to end sentences
in question marks?
surely certainty and
alack, its absence,
haunts
all your waking poems,
wonder does your mother know
what you’ve purloined,
stored in you
from her withins?
so young, so much love
oil spilling,
do you wonder about
the depth of the field
you are drilling, extracting -
is the soft supple supply,
so, close to the surface,
endless?
life so far is but a draft.
take copious notes
for the best is yet
and I await patiently
the novella of your
adventures!
Jan 25, 2015
Jan 25, 2015 at 10:07 AM UTC
ice fire and the cryogene.
clear water with most love.
sprouting the finest being.
The god of love.earth.
Mar 7, 2020
Mar 7, 2020 at 8:10 PM UTC
The clock ticking cuts through my soul
You are only seventeen
Am I really too old?
Feb 27, 2020
Feb 27, 2020 at 3:26 PM UTC
Seventeen back then
***** and late nights we spent
Partying like it's the end
Memories I'd never imagined
With you whom I'd never yenned
But then a day came
A vivid memory in Love lane
When you left me like a sane
Leaving me in pain
Crying my heart out in vain
And again I regain all the strength
Back in the game
Same name but on aflame
Now all I can say
Is that Thank you my seventeen
Feb 8, 2020
Feb 8, 2020 at 9:41 AM UTC
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.
-
Jan 29, 2020
Jan 29, 2020 at 3:23 PM UTC
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.
Jan 13, 2020
Jan 13, 2020 at 8:01 PM UTC
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?
Dec 3, 2019
Dec 3, 2019 at 8:59 PM UTC
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)
Nov 16, 2019
Nov 16, 2019 at 8:51 PM UTC
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.
Jul 21, 2019
Jul 21, 2019 at 8:58 PM UTC
When I was 17
I wanted to be just like it.
A girl of the heedless, of a twisted wind
And lashing overstory.
Bold in choice eyes burning gallant
When I stood not alone
On screaming nights
In crowded habitation
Writing my future’s
Threatening tumult
Apart from regularity
Prerogative, accompanying grail
Withered leaves of change.
Left with nothing more,
But to turn them over.
Apr 2, 2019
Apr 2, 2019 at 12:23 AM UTC
When I was seventeen
I held onto the destiny,
But now see i’m eighteen
And where I’ve been.
All the mountains,
Seemed Nearby hills
But look I just tumbled down,
From the very top
All bruised and broken.
There’s this wide ocean to dive
But they don’t know
I drowned.
Oh I was just seventeen!
doing everything
I didn’t mean.
But see it’s late... for
Yesterday I turned eighteen
They say, it is summer that
the sun shines the brightest
but they don’t know
It burned too.
it all seemed
so small,
just like a hole
in the gigantic boat,
I overlooked for
I had just turned seventeen
And forgot that
someday I’ll be eighteen.
It was all just a fancy,
a teenage melody,
sweet to taste
but poison to my body.
The carefree vibrant soul
nourished my
seventeen and nothing
was left for the
soon to be eighteen.
Oh what I have been, just
while jumping to the eighteen.
A jump takes you upwards
but mine was directed
only downwards.
Down Down
down with him
they all shouted.
Shouts their faces didn’t shout
but ones only my backs could hear.
Ohh seventeen!!
Ooh eighteen!!
Wish I had a different
Ending to my teen.
Mar 29, 2019
Mar 29, 2019 at 6:02 AM UTC
In all honesty,
Seventeen syllables just
Can’t show all my love.
Dec 29, 2018
Dec 29, 2018 at 1:26 PM UTC