Growing Up

It comes slowly.
Think of it as gradually stepping into water
Testing, tasting, moving in inch by inch.
Until your limbs are extended into fathomless depths
And they find comfort.

It comes quickly.
Think of it as breaking into water
And breathing out hot bubbles of existence
Which blemish the surface    
As desperate certainty that you existed THERE
Even momentarily.

You breathe in air and take in a world within your lungs
Which expand to accept the air
And contract to let go of all that was unimportant.
You have the wind knocked out of you and you watch as
The world comes undone and you realize
That you breathed in more than just air
And you didn't let go of
All
That was unimportant.

You spend days in the bright light staring at a white ceiling observing how
It changes so suddenly into  
Orange as though
Change is just That sudden and
That transformative
         
The white ceiling becomes a cream-coloured ceiling and
You spend days in brighter light staring at a cream-coloured ceiling observing how
The shadows of fans dance faster than you ever could    
But as fast as you once wanted to.

Which becomes a lavender ceiling with light that hurts your eyes and
You spend days observing how that was
Supposed to be transformative and beautiful and how
It isn't.                

You burst into laughter and break into tears and
Realize that bursting and breaking aren't all that different anyway
So you burst into tears and break into laughter because
They don't feel all that different anyway.

You know loneliness like a parrot on your shoulder
That speaks only when not spoken to
Like when you are in a crowd
And you realize you empathize with the centre of a circle      
Because centres are surrounded
Equidistantly by isolation.  

You experience things unique to 2 AM
At 11 AM
And you nearly-strip
Both your clothes and soul
At 7 PM
Before a crowd of strangers
Who have faces you know you'll forget
But much like death,
That doesn't stop you from being afraid
That you will forget.
         
So once in a while you strip only in your head
For yourself                        
And you realize everyone's dirty little secret
That no one ever tells:
There is liberation in nakedness.    
                       




It comes slowly.
Think of it as asking yourself
'Why do we grow up?'
And answering it with
'Because we forget we don't have to.'                    






It comes quickly.
Think of it as asking yourself
'Why do we grow up?'
And answering it with
'Because we realize we want to.'

Back Wash or Boys Who Know Their Poetry

Today
You told me that sometimes after you meet
Someone New
You want to go to the bathroom and scream
And scream
Till you cannot breathe.

I didn't know how to respond, so I told you that it was okay.
It was okay to vomit a steady colour of
Grey-green-black
Conversation that hurt you so much
In all its perfunctoriness
That you would rather claw your nails
Into your fist
And leave five little unformed moons each
Than meet someone new again.

I meant it was okay to see the world
Through infrared
Broken lens
Half-formed sentences
And expect every word to unfurl into your lap
Revealing something else

And don't you tell me
That that is beauty.

I meant that when they diagnose us with
Idealism
It isn't equivalent to a report reading O negative.

Today
I meant to tell you
That conversation is back wash
A less-acceptable form of intimacy
But if you exchanged the image of two people
Drinking the same poison
With two oceans meeting and twisting
And breaking
Like two tongues
Meeting and twisting
And breaking
Apart
You'd realize conversation is intimacy made naked.

You scream because you want to unleash
Into an ocean that will drink you in
And accept your back wash being
And for the eons of extended metaphor-shaped oceans you can see
Everyone is screaming
Their grey-green-black disgust
Silently.

I meant to tell you
That you learnt your poetry
Before your tongue could move around your ABCs
And your screams are synchronized to
Play and pause at every halted heartbeat.

And don't you tell me
That that isn't beauty.

I meant that when they diagnose us with
Idealism
It isn't equivalent to a report reading HIV.