Everything sways with wonder and is loud while silent and suspenseful like a dream.
She jumps! Frolics along the street She skips, hops, runs She dances Then she falls She scrapes her Knee, the pain runs Through her. Her mournful scream Fills the street with sadness.
I think I may be dying.
I’ve been going to sleep earlier and earlier every night.
I think I’m lying down for a nap
then I wake up in the morning ready for a little bit more.
I don’t know how this came to be but I have some vague idea.
It came from this You I often address in poems because he’s so difficult to address in reality.
But every now and then I try, when I think he might be asleep so that when he picks up the
phone I’m armed with
“Did I wake you up’! Nevermind then”
and maybe he’ll think he dreamed me.
Anyway, I caught him awake one night and the conversation filtered down to something he called
“brainjuice”
which I imagined like a more watery duck sauce, that same brownish orange.
Or something I’d been forced to eat in the past and oh I hate to give my mother
so much satisfaction for eating it. Maybe I should have had more though
But that’s not when or why I started dying.
I’ll get there soon though, just hold on.
So brainjuice, as I remember it is what makes people smell in a certain way and
what makes us perceive and remember smells like that.
Like
after spending too much time on a plane recently,
the smell of my shin made me think of not one but two friends that I had forgotten I’d lost
touch with.
The aforementioned You smells like some sort of fuzzy tea
plus something else (I suppose his brain juice) in that way all attractive boys
must.
I sat amongst my Indian pillows
(that smell not like jasmine but probably of my own lost brainjuice)
and I resisted his resistance to the idea that people have to be sick with something in order to
die. He told me that people just run out of brainjuice. I was contrary for no reason.
Maybe because my juice was concentrated to one side.
Maybe because I want to go spread lilacs or something like some woman I read
about as a child.
I don’t even like flowers or gardening the way I should but I want to do
something like that. But now I don’t have enough juice left to even argue.
It‘s soaked out of my ears during the day.
I thought the extra wax was from hormones
And the fatigue,
Well,
everything can be explained away
My life my steps my juice my words my breaths
I am 17 years old and withering away,
but I just don’t have enough organization to die.
It will have to be amongst magazines and newspapers to soak up the mess.
and open windows to air out the smell and then
the last of it will leak out
Those open windows won’t even show anything nice, just a white brick courtyard.
Dying by the sea with a
shock of white hair is only for the heroines of my favorite kids’ books
PS: the magic page that will always jump you to the latest poem is "http://www.saintannsny.org/depart/computer/poems.html"