girl please.

We’re sitting in my car.
The freeway above us
is roaring like man-made thunder
because trains went out of style
with handwritten letters
and high school sweethearts,
and she tells me,
they don’t believe her.
We’re seniors in high school,
and we both know,
that’s just another word for
broken-record questions
of college-bound degree-expectant
salary-hungry achievement-bullshit,
like,
“why don’t you have your life
figured out like algebra?
Why aren’t you fitting
your hearts for the boxes yet?”
This poem is dedicated to many things,
among them,
finals week.
Shrunken behind stacks of
information I didn’t learn
God knows when I should have,
we begin to ask ourselves
why we signed up for us,
and they continue interrogating,
“Why do you dance like Armageddon is coming?
You’ll know, soon enough,
stupid kids,
you’ll have bills to unwrap
you’ll have shoes to fill, big shoes,
and they are stiff,
so iron your face to match.
Be an adult.”
This is dedicated to childhood,
and I don’t remember mine
so forgive me
for making one now,
she wants to be a screenwriter.
She wants to save Africa.
She wants to build a homeless shelter
to keep out the winter
faces kept strong fighting things like
cold and poverty
don’t have need for reshaping,
yet they have the nerve to continue,
“You’ll never change the world.
Stupid kids,
stop wasting all your sparkle.
Stop playing pretend,” they say,
like childhood doesn’t have
life measured out like sugar cookies,
like birthday candles should never
have been wished on in the first place,
successful lives are bred
in library halls
that laugh at the thought
of ever housing a fairytale,
you’ll thank us,
they say.
We build you these libraries,
these playgrounds for
economic stability,
we built this freeway
that your dreams are parked beneath,
we pragmatists,
with our suit jackets
with our ironed faces
and box-fitted hearts,
not the travels
we forgot to map
when graduate school came knocking,
nobody flies.
Nobody sings.
These are the things they tell us.
This is dedicated to the girl who let me know
that these things they tell us
are lies.
Libraries aren’t libraries
without a little bit of impossibility,
and she reminds me,
they are wrong about the sparkle.
Maybe she'll never be a screenwriter.
Maybe I’ll never write
myself into those libraries,
but it won’t be for lack of believing,
see,
the stars in the skies,
are really already gone,
but their legacies have outlived them
light-years still channeling their
mysteries our way,
so, Emilie, I don’t wish
on falling stars anymore
I just keep stacking up doubts
you've helped me displace,
naming all the possibilities left over
in your honor.