Kids your age. Pimple-faced college drop-outs who have made unhealthy sums of money forming internet companies that create no concrete products, provide no viable services, and still manage to generate profits for all of its lazy day-trading son-of-a-bitch shareholders. Meanwhile, as a tortured member of the disenfranchised proletariat, you find some altruistic need to protect these digital plantation-owners? – Dean, Serendipity

I’m There.

I’ve never taken the time to look inside myself to see what really counts. Endless days and sleepless nights I put them all behind me, as there’s nothing I can do. Crying out without the tears and dreams. I’ve lost myself inside myself; there is no place to hide. Eventually I’ll climb back out and give myself a scare. All you need to think about is now that I am there.

Born To Run.

We are opposites.

I have roots.
You float on the breeze.

I can’t follow where you go and I can’t leave my life behind.
You can’t settle down and won’t calm down.

You are the ocean.
I am the cliffs you erode.

I can’t go on your adventures.
I have to grow up.

We are opposites.

Yet we reach for each other.

Don’t the waves hug the land and the trees stretch toward the sky?

But the waves can never stay with the cliffs and the tree can not follow the breeze.

Gone Too Soon.

Real Girls

Ladies don’t spread their legs, but girls may do cartwheels. Ladies don’t spit, but boys may do so. Ladies don’t laugh too loudly, but happy people burst at the seams. Ladies don’t intrude on men, but men may intrude on women. Ladies are polite, ladies are this, ladies are that. Ladies are robots.

Ladies are poor fakes who attempt to appear human in order to appease society and good manners. Life is natural. It’s not well-mannered. You’re born crying so why conceal your tears? Mom never had an answer to that one either. She just said it made people uncomfortable, that it was not proper. Whoever set up the rules of propriety obviously didn’t do a whole lot of living.

I don’t want to be a girl or a boy or a man or a woman and I certainly don’t want to be a lady- no matter what mother says. I want to jump and scream and laugh and tell the honest-to-goodness truth. I want to be free. Is that so much to ask? Nobody asked me if I wanted a corset. Nobody asked me if I wanted chains around my wrists. They talk about progress and woman’s suffrage and freedom but they’ve replaced social restrictions with euphemisms, heavy-handed judgments, and great expectations. The only difference is these cuffs are transparent. Visible or not the wind can still whip you in the face; audible or not, a church can still chastise you with its murmurs and its pointed glances.

Ladies don’t make rude, open comments; they tell white lies. Ladies do not sin. Lying, however, is a sin. Ladies don’t do a lot of things but they do contradict themselves. To Hell with being a lady. Give me back my converse and baseball cap and I’ll show you a lady with some pride, a lady who can outrun all the boys and be a credit to her gender because a sex’s merit is not found in the drawing room or at the dining table; a sex’s merit is in the personalities it can boast. It’s in the range of characters it produces- not the robots a society turns out.

A person should be judged by her strength- moral, physical, and emotional- not her virtue and some good-for-nothing white dress. Forget your lady’s virtue. Mine isn’t between my legs and you won’t find it in the kitchen. Mine is in my heart and those muddy, unlaced converse. Unlike your heels they don’t let out the standard, dehumanizing clack and they don’t blister my heels. When my feet hit the ground you won’t hear a lady or any of those impersonal echoes they leave on marble floors. You’ll hear the concrete steps of me and only me, the deafening sound of where I’ve been and where I’m going- lady or no lady.

She.

There are times that she is good at pretending;
Times that she forgets the pain.
She believes her smiles and laughter,
Everyone follows, just the same.

But then there are times when she remembers
And the pain and hurt hit like
Two cars on the thruway
Going 80, colliding,
Life taking, no denying.
All the energy is taken away,
The river runs down her face.
The injuries can’t be healed,
Can’t be forgotten,
Not for a long time.

There are times when she is so hurt,
She can’t pretend, she can’t hide.
She shows her pain for everyone to see,
They wait to see her cry.
There are times when she runs away,
She can’t handle the crowd around her.
She wants someone to run after her,
To find her,
To remind her she’ll be alright.

There are times when she is not brave.
There are times when all she can do is cry.
Moments when people she trusted the most
Move out of her life.
Moments when she feels alone,
A skeleton with nothing inside.

There are times when she fakes a smile and a laugh.
Times when she seems fine.
She wishes it were true,
But she knows once she’s alone,
She will breakdown and cry.

Chauvinist Pigs.

male chauvinist

–noun
a male who patronizes, disparages, or otherwise denigrates females in the belief that they are inferior to males and thus deserving of less than equal treatment or benefit.

I am a woman, not a girl
I have the same eyes, I see the same world

I am a woman, not a girl
I have breasts, I have curves

I am a woman, not a girl
I have intelligence, I have confidence

I am a woman, not a man
They preach subservience, to fall before their hand

I am a woman, not a man
They proclaim superiority, crave to control

I am a woman, not a man
They say I have no ability; I cannot do what they can

I am a woman, not a girl
I have aspirations, I have strengths

I am a woman, not a girl
I have to think before I act, I stop before I do

I am a woman, not a girl
I have cares, I have worries

I am a woman, not a man
Fated to be slighted for what I am

I am a woman, not a man
Meant to bear children and keep a house

I am a woman, not a man
I do not have a right to think or be

I am a woman, not a man
I must sit behind, never stand

I am a woman, not a man
I have the right to do and be what I am

I am a woman, not a man

And I can do every fucking thing they can.

Transient Beauty.

Transient. Trans is from the Latin word for across. Beauty. Well who knows what that is? We all think we know. That’s probably true for most of us. I do but only sometimes. Beauty is sort of a ghost, a ghost that embodies whatever we choose for it to define. That’s beauty. In society beauty is lust and beauty is art and beauty is what we are taught to behold. In reality, however, beauty is none of these things.

Beauty is undefinable. Not because it has no definition or purpose. No it’s undefinable because it’s grace and the veil of beauty is so thin it’s nearly transparent. It’s changing and it’s surprising and it comes and goes as it pleases. Beauty doesn’t make appointments and it doesn’t come by request. Beauty is wild and does as it wishes. It likes to sneak up on you and it likes to gradual appear.

Beauty is a muse and it changes form with its will. Unlike the beauties in our magazines, the beauties in our paintings, and the beauties in our stories, beauty cannot be captured. Instead, it leaves us like children on a moonlight hill trying to catch lightning bugs in a jar with no lid. Sometimes it comes but how long it stays or how we capture it is up to the beauty.

It’s of a free, unpolluted, intangible, and transient nature and while we can describe it and see it and remember it, we can grasp it no more easily than if we were to reach up and try to seize a cloud.

Dawn Princess.

I am the dawn princess
Standing in an endless fog
Screaming with no voice
Crying dry tears
Pieces ‘me’ scattered on the ground
sharing my world with nothing but shadows

When you were my everything
When the sun shone at night
and little flames dancing in the sky
I had to find you

And then the cliff
and nothint but roaring water
hearing your voice like an echo in the wind
telling me how the world should be
so, please
Take me far away from you

Wandering the empty streets
your voice still an echo in the not rising smoke
I am the dawn princess
ruling an empty kingdom

If Only.

If only is one of those wonderful terrible phrases, isn’t it? It’s one of those things that opens up the possibilities of what you could do if only. That’s a wonderful thought. It allows boys to touch the moon if only they could become astronauts. It allows girls to be models if only they would grow into six foot tall, beautiful amazons. If only.

But the secret to if only, after you’re done dreaming, is that it really is if only. It’s a wonderfully expansive yet limiting phrase. Expansive in thoughts and dreams and clouds and all those things that you can’t ever really grasp, just look at and marvel. You can look at an elephant shaped cloud and it doesn’t make it any more of an elephant than it makes me the leader of a ringed circus.

If only. But if only gets you nowhere because you’re saying it while sitting on a hill, fingers intertwined with blades of grass, neck craned painfully upward at the places you could only be if only you were a bird. Well, I’m no bird. I’m a girl and I’ll only look eye level at a nest or the top of a tree from my bedroom window.

If only. Yes it’s a terrible wonderful phrase. It will get me nowhere and leave me here, watching the clouds until cold but gentle drops of rain draw goosebumps on my bony arms and nudge me inside. I think I’ll never say it again, such a vile thing for sending me inside. Maybe after I go in I won’t say it. Yes just after. Because as much as it leaves me here in body, sometimes it lets me stretch for that blue and white elephant in spirit.

If only things could go on like that forever. If only the rain would never come and that cloud would stay with me, sharing an otherwise dull and calm afternoon. It gives me a false hope but a hope nonetheless. If only.