Paperweight Poetry

I want to ring the doorbell of kindergarten as though the world is about to end, and express my condolences to my mother for the six-year old styled truth that I am growing up, and come to an agreement with the alphabet that it’ll just have to stick in my mind as I recontextualize construction paper and crayons in a new class where I have no friends and render invisible revolution on the playground of my mind which means that now I sit on the bench and I’ll scribble your name madly in binders with unicorn stickers until I learn to pickpocket books from cars and library shelves, sniffing the old librarian’s fingers and binding glue off the pages, see myself wider in the mirror so that I flip off hunger and set it to music, negotiating with yogurt cups and the fingers around my wrist, then insincerely apologizing to my mattress for the punk albums I stow in its chest. I offer obsolete garbage talk to my father as a sacrifice to his mediocrity, movi...

Let us not forget the miles it took for us to get here; how long it took to stop getting cozy with chaos, to stop planting any seed we caught from the wind in the garden of our hearts. And let us not forget the first time you turned off the light and sat alone in the dark and you felt safe; because once you’ve survived it’s like having all your first’s again except no one is there to hold your hand, so let us not forget the first time you ate after it happened, I think it was a strawberry Pop-Tart, the first words that you said, even if they were as quiet as dove wings, they were words, the first time you wrote a sentence, even if you forgot the commas, then took a shower and brushed your hair. And let us not base these “first’s” on the fact that this is the first time you walked to your car and no one hurt you, but instead it is the first time you got behind the wheel and you drove, until the sky bled out like a beautiful gunshot wound, ...