First time I Learned About Love
A boy in my elementary school
Showed me how to ride the swings during the first recess of first grade.
It was before I learned how to tie my shoes,
Nor absorbing the all-time secret of how to braid.
I’d never spoken to him before,
But it was still the time where assuming new friendships was common practice.
It was my first science lesson about momentum,
And the first time I chased the feeling of flying.
We raced to see who could get highest in the air
like the birds that sometimes adopted the monkey bars,
And infected my other classmates with the same two lessons he taught me that day.
Anti-Ode to Spring
Rumored to bring new beginnings,
But with the expense of runny noses and stiff knees
A fresh start,
Tainted with mandatory fatigue or constant buzzing.
Sun-seeking wildflowers and joints,
Until they too begin wallowing in anticipation.
Disconnection
Giving yourself away,
Not at the dismay of your own mind
But rather to mush it together with another
And comfort both simultaneously
Takes much more courage than dangerous physical maneuvers,
But that is because it is the first step.
To find something,
Someone,
To brings you
To believe that nothing matters
But your own willpower
Is dreamy.
So great and so rare
Because the biggest heap to conquer before skipping to the end
Is the ability to tell someone how you feel and not be responded to with disconnection.
The rejection that misunderstanding projects
Is a bigger punch in the gut than whatever original emotion was causing such a struggle.
An apology for someone not being able to comprehend what your call for help is
Mites and Me
As mites crawl across my thighs and invade all means of personal space,
Amongst the discomfort, contentment arises as well.
These bugs and I have history,
Their ancestors were my midday snack.
They know the birds too,
The critters’ response to their buzzing caws were many of the creatures’ last words.
Unlike me, though,
They will never know the source
Of the revving from zipping cars,
Ocean foam’s warmth,
Or find simplicity in a breeze and not the fear of being displaced from the tree you called home.
Letter to the Monsters
Dear monster under my bed,
I hope you’ve grown out of immaturity like I’ve attempted to.
Sure, I still jump from the edge of my door frame into my sheets
For all the same reasons,
Too dark or too late,
But I hope you’re ambitions have grown to be larger than
Grabbing my ankles to secure my lost teeth,
But rather to know what you’ve been hiding from.
I hope you've transformed to be a much more respectable stature,
Or have just given up to the point of invisibility.
I don’t have to wish, though,
Because I've always known what you’ve looked like,
Yet I have only came to be fully aware recently
That you will always embody what I fear most in myself.
In Love
Being in love with you
Was allowing myself to fully move through
My past passions.
To be childlike, loud, cry for fun,
To be social unacceptable
And you still want to know more.