I'll give you my thoughts for a penny.

Only a penny, because they're certainly not worth a nickel, five cents for the five fingers I'll frequently run along my collarbones, imagining myself imagining the moment when you did the same, all that's left now is the ghost of your fingers, negative space.

Not worth a dime. A dime I'll use to buy a caramel that'll glue my teeth together and trap the words I know I'll regret later on.

The sweetness of my unsaid words will linger for hours.

Not worth a quarter, 25, enough for all my fingers and toes, and one more for the hand that seems to linger around my throat, incarcerating monologues I can't seem to make anyone understand.

Certainly not worth a dollar, a dollar I'd use to buy sour patch kids, partly because I know they're your favorite, (you can appreciate the way they'll sting your tongue after a while, and the oxymoron living in the sour sugar that coats them), and partly because I sure am sour, and after all, I'm only a kid.

I lived celebrating the morning.
Needless to say, we were never crushed then.
Burn the colored pencils,
Translucent colors will be lined up on the piles of wood.
From Asia to Europe, drawing the year for you.
Oh, I love the celebration of my awards!
Now you're enjoying my fall.
Portraits of video girls in the museum,
Unwillingly preserve a different kind of gender.
Stoic prostitutes gawk at you.
I took you down to the laced ocean,
Told you to tolerate the administration.
You choose not to.
Thank you.

Your architecture is sullen.
Staring at my feet.
A subtle carnival of new hell.
I wish i was wasted.
The tilework of you.
I am a stained glass house in shades of navy blue.
I was renting your excellence,
I am cordially invited to break.
Paintings of Europe curve in my mind.
On the beach consuming the Americas for you.
Going-Away feathers wreck ancient balance.

You know, I said that we grew in happiness, ambitious possibility, and laughter.
I lied.
What really happened?
There are two sides of the same coin.
I self imposed personalities, but without confidence.
Time amplified my perception of life.
I feel high a lot of the time.
You tell me about the fragility of your confidence, and I really relate to that.
We came of age with the traditional loss and terrible manners.
I wish I weren't still the village joke.

It's funny, no one knows about that one day I went to the Guidance office
And I cried for an hour
I was sitting in a corner
On the floor
There were black linoleum tiles
Coated with a fine pelt of dust bunnies.

I tried breathing in the problems people came to discuss in anguish and the tears and despair of my predecessors
To fill that empty space in the back of my throat
That you get when you cry for too long and your face is stiff with tears and your eyes sting, because  you've been holding a staring contest with reality, and you lost, but after you caved, and blinked, the sting still lingered.

The space at the back of my throat stayed empty and it stayed that way all day.
When I went back to class and my eyes were rimmed red and occasionally my breaths would come in short gasps like a marathon runner- I guess I was running a marathon- although one of a different sort,
And nobody noticed I had been crying because on the day I chose to break down another wave of bad news hit the school and so I was overshadowed so they all had trembling jaws and glistening eyes as well and,

I still can't decide whether or not I wanted someone to notice that I had been crying.