When I was eleven I came home
with a piece of paper
back then I knew
how much those five letters  
would determine how much
you were worth
and as a kid, I felt pretty
worthless
there was a time I remember
before the paper
where all I would do
was draw

Mountains fascinated me
and that’s what I drew
all the time, mountains
I drew them with snow caps-
Without snow caps
I drew trees at the foot of them
Plaster a setting sun in the distance
Made them look like teeth
And a road came from them
Leading nowhere but to you

I was eleven
When I tasted the value
Of myself
Slapped across my cheek
Like a tattoo
And the first word
To be printed on me
For everyone to see;
Failure

And they all knew that
Was true
I could never turn my mountains
Into Everests
My trees into the Amazon Basin
Or my lakes into the Atlantic
And I ran through the world;
A blank piece of paper,
All of a sudden everybody had
A reason to use a sharpie

I’ll never be able
To make my mountains
Into Himalayas

And I can never stop them from
Using their Sharpies,
After a while your skin color
Doesn’t matter anymore
What they see on you is a story
And they can tell me what they think
But they’ve never seen my back
The things that I’ve carved on to the
surface of my spine
She feels them sometimes when we
have ***
trying to figure out where the period
ends.