She grins without calculation
She laughs without rumination
She spends sleepless nights
dancing with her arms around new best strangers
I do my dance in the corner of my room.
The rhythm! the rhythm of my head
as I bang it against the bed
4/4
electropop
watch how I groove
as I pace
in the corner of my room.

Mother doesn't sleep
Mother shovels through my journals
rakes through my brain with pliers, tweezers,
forceps she drags through the hemispheres
with a wet face.

Could you be a fool
just for tonight?
Can we pretend my mind is mine?
I swallowed these things so that they don't poision the water
running through this house.
I did it for you
I wanted to be like you.

She lays out her pillow in her friend's living room and tells them
abut the boy in her fourth period
who holds her gaze like it's precious.
They giggle through the feathers
It's midnight and mother sleeps.

Fourth period I peeled my eyes.
I crumpled the paper and threw it away.
Could you be a fool
just for today?

I bled my secrets out of my forearms
and you saw the stains on the carpet.
I fought to keep an eighth of the things she flaunted for free
why can't you see
I did it for you?
I fear the day
I be come you.

Mother, sleep a while longer
you spent all night crying, clutching
sopping piles of meaty tissue.
it's yours. My skull! hollow—
I am tired now
that you see me:
jaded, wayward daughter.
Let me sleep a while longer
dream of she:
everything I could not be.