DUNCE

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