wph

After dusk, we become paranoid. Our brains, primed for hyperactive pattern seeking by millennia of evolution, can't help but tell us that that noise downstairs was an intruder, or maybe even something worse...

On my sixteenth birthday.

I curled into a ball in the frayed, silk afterglow of childhood, 

When you are old

Your skin will become like paper,

And your bones will be like the wooden ribs

Of a lantern

So that the world will see the light in your chest.

But I don't need to wait

I hung in the sky, frowning down at the city below me 

Scowling because Peter Pan went away. 

I had stretched, and my body had run away 

In the years since then. 

It is one A.M.

I am depressed, on insta.

Oh, to lead their lives

Instead

I wish I was bigger.

I wish I had a little bit more muscle.

I wish there was more between my skin and my bones,

That my ribs wouldn’t show when I take off my shirt,

That I wasn’t made of tissue paper.