Twelfth Year Lament

Suddenly I'm not twelve anymore. I haven't been twelve in a long time, but I'm always myself when I'm twelve.

if there’s anything i’ve noticed, it’s the way
we leave ourselves cloaked
in the dissonance 	separating 
imagination from social
survival; you lathered your skin 
in soft oil	pastels, blended your 
shame with the shadow
of a golden hour: 	an apparition.

no wonder the other children avoided your eyes.

two hounds traced their every move,
in the key of invisible	ink. if the goal
was always to witness ourselves
on the way back home to our own 
open palms,		why 
have we insisted on taking the long way
through hills? sunken in the empty
virtue of adolescence:	girls

nursed you friendship, their baby inside a fantasy.

no one ever saw you levitate over paradise
feral, raining royal	blue glitter
off a red dress. you created the illusion of violet
and you outdressed the host. you were shunned

for the same reason that writing is also rewriting. 

From the film “Angels Egg”