Growing Pains

my wisdom teeth are coming in

i’ve fallen with too many pills.

my knees are no longer

grass and playground-concrete

stained and scraped.

and they say it’s freedom that’s coming,

but i can’t help but

hear the rumblings

of a draining lifetime of numbers and deadlines

upon the horizon

choking me out.

my lungs are burning for the summer air

after a thunderstorm.

For the lighting i’ve fallen in love with

over and over again.

little me so full of life,

who loves so fiercely

excited for the wide world to come

a being and body so soft

which fails me now.

perhaps it’s all just.

Growing pains.

the count down to a

tenth of a 2

has begun,

and there’s been a party

added to this wake.

i’ve spent years mourning

i lay flowers to rest in the forest

i grew into;

a memorial for the childhood i had and a funeral for the one i never will. an emptiness

for the brethren i knew in the dew of my youth

and lost as a teen.

a conglomeration of friendships so pure

grown to fermented fruit.

​

 

i yearn to quench my thirst.

faces i know

born in my youth

turned perfect people

i wish, i had, i was.

how to grow so gracefully?

how to not have so much dirt across one's heart.

how to eat life so perfectly.

perfect people

excited to forget me.

those that i’ll never stop remembering.

i know you.

how have you avoided the guilt and the grime?

the becoming victim to suffocation among all the debris? Growing pains and loss

and a missingness

for that wondrous solidarity that raised my bones out of the flower beds of my youth

and held onto my soul

as the summer sun holds onto the late july sky.

sisters and brothers

bound by the playground blood,

and dead-end futures

teen years of the same town.

people i long for,

mirrors of all i want to be

i still know you,

and you me.