written last night

I’ve changed this year.

I’m no longer the dazed freshman who titled my new high school “The Labyrinth of Education,” who wandered nervously around unfamiliar hallways and shrunk against the back of my plastic chair in class, surrounded by upperclassmen with dyed hair. I used to write short poems about leaves and the smell of fall; now I write longer posts where the leaves are always a metaphor and the smell of fall is probably sexual. I banter with people I would’ve been scared to talk to. I get up on stages and on sidewalks and on stone walls on the edge of waterfalls and yell poetry out to the sunset sky, which ignores me and goes on doing sky-type things, as skies are wont to do. I’m a little more crazy and a little less cautious and still oblivious, but about different things. Maybe that means I’ve matured.

I.
Firelight, flickering.
Shadows. I saw only
the light; the darkness
didn’t matter.
My world was this
bright-lit circle
of dancing yellow-red
that jumped across faces
and glanced off my skin
in needles of
heat.
Sparks erupted to the treetops.
A branch fallen and consumed
by lazy red-blue flames. Hungry.
Beware Of Fire, you know
how it can get out of control.
How it can burn.

II.
There’s a part of me that
wants to coax fire onto my hand,
to lift it to my lips and
breath it in.
I want to kiss fire, to
drink it in like water
and keep it alive
inside me. Warm flames.
Look inside me, deeper down.
Blue eyes. Brown hair.
Blush-mottled cheeks.
And a sigh-flash of fire.
Can’t you see? Don’t you know
what smolders beneath my skin?
You can’t. It’s not there.
I’m empty, charred inside,
a burned-out abandoned human shell.

III.
I used to have nightmares about
fire, back before
I stopped being scared of my dreams.

Listening to Baba O’Riley
to keep that bitter too-warm feeling
from sinking into
my manipulative mind.
I’m a bitch, and I’m
cruel and I don’t know
which is worse—
if I didn’t mean it or if
I did. Both. I’m feeling
both. I’m
confused,
not Confusion--or
maybe, or something
similar.
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Everything got way too complicated
and I can’t rely on what
I know I should do because
I have no clue what that is.
That’s the problem.
Usually birthdays don’t
make me feel any different
but this year—
this year everything changed.
Or maybe things tried to go back to
how they were a year ago
but too much has happened since then.

My moral compass stopped working
ages ago
and I abandoned it by a dirt road,
just another
useless gleam of litter in the trees.
I’m trying to figure out
what I’m feeling but
it keeps changing too
and I’ve given up on that compass pointing
North—