Pwmage

This is me now,
this is me on the grass and
me in my coat and
me eating steel cut oatmeal in the mornings.
I have not decided how I feel about it.

I cannot smell my perfume over
everyone else's
and I am wilting into my dress

all I can do is love,
I love with the fruitless vigor of
a pair of shoes that don't fit.

It is a running joke in my family
that my father and I always dress
ten degrees too cold for the weather;
I spend my days shivering down Dunster Street
and listening for car horns over the clatter
of leaves against my bare legs

I make black coffee
it is my penance

when the bell
rings you will
be holy like
white milk

We are all good people but
it becomes some of us
more than others

now you are using a different font
for all your correspondence because
it is an easier goodbye to
Times New Roman than to
the faces that lurk in the corner
of your eye like errant contact lenses

for fear of loneliness
I abandon my computer and
sit alone on the linoleum
watching my fingernails
and willing them not to grow

I am standing in the J-entry laundry room
with a pair of my sweatpants, hot from the drier,
laid across my face.
I adore them and I adore their smell
like they are those of someone I love.
I suppose that I am someone I love;
the two of us certainly have a lot in common.

Here is something:
I love chocolate, I love applesauce,
I love peanut butter;
these are things I am sure of.

There is a bruise on my forehead,
      under my bangs,
the result of two consecutive nights
waking up in the dark and
smashing my head into the wall
that borders my bed.
I would like to sleep but
I have concerns.

My feet always hurt; I have chosen
frivolity over practicality and my
shoes reflect all of my mortal failings.
I am drinking tea compulsively because
I get nervous around girls.

I would kill mice and leave them at the foot
of your bed, but nobody likes blood in the morning.

Good morning to you, good morning
I will stir you into my oatmeal so that
you can commune with the brown sugar

When I carry a pizza box through the Square
everybody wants to be my friend.

There are no lids for the coffee,
and you know as well as I do that
nothing good will ever come from a
packet of Sweet'n Low. It is the long part
of afternoon and to stay awake
I am in love with you from across the table.

I am an expert;
it is mostly to do with your shoes.

I am filled with dumplings that
I cannot name in any language
and the sun on State Street is more intrusive
than it has the right to be.

When Iddoshe explains how it came to be
that every pair of her shoes is stuck
on a boat from Japan to Kentucky,
I fall in love with the intensity of her gestures;
I absorb it like nutrients.

We are not the same
but I wish I could save you with me.

My fingers are your birthday candles
and they are the kind that
won't be blown out. They are left over
from the surprise party we threw for
Mrs. Capone in the fourth grade, when she
was middle-aged and beyond our healing.

When you are another year older
I would like to know you better
and wear your clothing as pajamas.

Sometimes I pass a basketball and it is
like I know exactly what I am doing;
I am gelatinous but well-meaning
and after years of lurking in the shadows of dodgeball
I still enjoy the squeaking
of sneakers on the laminated wood floor.

You are playing piano
and I busy myself with loving
each contraction of your arrogant knuckles;
you fell from your mother's womb
straight onto the keys.

Cambridge has exactly the kind of drainage
you'd expect a four-hundred-year-old city to have;
last year every street corner was moated
with sleet. Mine is a life of wet sneakers and cold feet.
I will curl up inside myself
to prepare for all kinds of winter.

I am nineteen,
which seems like a very nice thing to be.

Everybody is depressed and we
are all writing it in on our forms with
dull pencils. I pull my shirt over the
bridge of my nose and learn what I smell like.
      The river does not mean what I thought it would,
      but I am growing for living on it.
When I was younger I would
set my clocks and watches fast but
now I don't want to tempt
the end of things to come any sooner.