Footprints

—

If there is one thing I have learned in this short life—
it is that those strange creatures who call themselves writers
were not made for this world—
we were made to be time capsules.

So come to me calmly—
with your shoes untied and your secrets shoved into your back pockets.
Do not spit them out into empty wrappers, to be stepped on by strangers
and die on street corners—
If you are going to leave them on the street, leave them like pennies,
placed in-between the cracks in-between the pavement,
for children to pick up and shove in their front pockets—
so they can feel like kings.

Leave them for me—
Because I’ve been spending my afternoons standing on rooftops
so the clouds can have a shoulder to cry on.
Because when it rains here, it fucking pours.
Pour yourself into me.
Trust me.
I can take it.

Crawl in like a spider.
Crawl in through the cracks in the broken windows to my soul.
Step in like you are stepping into a summer storm—
I can wash away everything you’ve ever been afraid of.
Cast your fears in like lures,
Cast them in through my pores—
And skip your promises like stones across the surfaces of my bones,
And let them sink
until I can feel them on the floors of my feet,
telling me where to go.

I’m not peeking I promise you.
I’ swear I’ll never make it to ten if you don’t want me to.

Because we’ve all been trying on people
like mismatched shoes given to us by strangers,
until we are all someone else’s hand-me-downs.
And yet we are consistently surprised
when no one fits just right.

And we’ve been searching for things in food we’ve never tasted
and movies we’ve never seen,
until our tongues are burnt, our stomachs are bloated and our eyes are bleeding,
but we’re still searching.
Because we all just want to be a part of something important.

So I will shout until you know what I mean.
Because I was not put here to put this gently.
I was put here to speak until I am drained completely—
Because this life has rubbed me raw,
and it has proven,
that it will try and take everything from you,
but it will never take my voice.

So I will spill my slurred words like black ink all over this floor
until my face is as white as the pages that I write on.

So grind your glacier teeth across my skin,
and wind me up again and again,
and do not stop until I say when,
Because this is the one I wrote when you were sleeping—
Your chest rising and falling to the tumbling tides of your dreams,
our hair and arms entwined like the twisted branches of trees.
So tired,
from always trying to reach for something outside of themselves.

Wake up and be wild with me.
Run with me—
Run like the sun is placing its hands on your shoulders and pushing you forward.
Pound your pale soles against this earth until they can read our poems in our footprints—
Until we can feel our lungs pressing against our hearts,
and our hearts pounding hard against our ribcage,
just to remind us that we are alive.

But I say to me heart, be still soldier—
Because my heart’s been beating, like the hearts of bare chested boys,
holding hands with barely dressed girls—
beating so hard it’s been sending splinters spiraling into my bloodstream.
Because my ribs were bent out of ragged wood
not made to cage such a restless thing.

But we were not made to be still, he says.
So punch your fists into the sky, he says.
Punch like you are punching holes into the clouds
and shake them until our knuckles are white as stars, he says.
We can re-arrange the constellations, he says.
We can lead ourselves home.