You’re looking at me
And my smile hurts more than usual
And I’m wondering what you see.
The confidence mask I’ve crafted?
Or the ugly yellow doubts snaking through it?
When I press daisies into worn story pages:
Am I preserving flowers,
Or locking away the worries they represent?
And Past is screaming,
Go
Go
Go
Where no one can ever forget you again.
But you give me that stupid, stupid look that makes flowers bloom in the cracks of my old concrete soul.
I smile, and you move on like your work is done, but I wrap my weary cliff-edge fingers around the flowers you’ve given me.
I think I will water them
Forever forever forever.
I thought I was my mother
We share chocolate hair
And pretty glass eyes.
But my father gave me his
Justice
And integrity
and his ability to see what’s real.
Who does that make me?
Some bloody teeth-bared mix of both of them?
When I reach for the dagger by my side,
Am I fighting for their monsters or mine?
They built me as a bomb and told me to destroy.
But I would not be their weapon.
I took my scissors and glue and stuck flowers to myself, scraps of torn-paper poetry to my lips.
I wrapped my scars with the sunlight melting the ice caked to my soul.
“Who taught you to love so grandly?” my friends wonder,
And I feel the daisies wrapped in my hands clutched tight. “No one but myself.”
And you say you love me but I think it must be the way the ice loves the rainy winter roads:
Coldly and stiflingly, with an unwanted sort of slipperiness to your smile.
I fear the ditch waiting for me to skid off the road.
Who are you to say I haven’t breathed wild nature?
My butterflies are carved from empty energy drink cans.
My jungles are skyscrapers, glittering glass towers brushing the pale blue sky.
Lightning races underneath my sneakers.
Who are you to say I haven’t breathed my soul, right where I am now?
If this is all there is—
What is this aching in my soul that draws me to the sky?
Is it an empty promise?
A forgotten dream?
No.
The sky is so crisp today I think I could reach out and dip my fingers in it.
The taste of breathed clouds lingers on my tongue, inviting me, offering a pale blue promise that won’t fall with empires.
I have no choice but to follow.
There’s a storm rolling in.
Though I may not have mountain air in my lungs and crashing jungle rivers running through my veins,
There’s a part of me in the sky tonight.
Thunder screams its deafening presence to the world.
I have no choice but to follow.
Melted honey eyes, pepper freckles, desert sun hair
That’s not what anyone sees, not the first time.
No, we see the timid smile
Of a girl who is trying to give the world a vast group hug, even if no one taught her how.