On Forgiving the Dust In My Piano

Dear daughter of Earth, 
I am not naked, rose-lipped, chapped and chaste in a poetic caste and silhouetted erotically before sunset and starlight like the Thinker gazing across foreseeable perpetuity. 

I am not tears, saliva, aching heart, wishing fervent start to part the waves and take away the stinging and wringing and feeling and dramatic state of an old man singing hunchedly.

I am not a breath of air, glamour, fame and cameras or obscure references you get when I smile into camera obscuras and my shadow dances across the ground simply, desperately.

I am not a dream, a reason, wretched ringing in ears or slinging beers and fierce acclaim to a name I can’t say but want anyway.

I am not purple, flowers in showers, glory and power or a lord at to cower and glower nor sweet summer clover, a lover, a wonder, I wander, I wonder mistakenly.

I am not stained, pained, painted or glorious, dramatic or furious, ancient, mysterious: a look in the past through a glass shows I’m nothing but sand from a small hand drifting away.

I am not dust, rust, lust; in God I trust I was never lessor nor better than the chipped paint echoes of a Hollywood neighborhood I linger in for the plot romantically.

I am no singer of songs or actress or poet or great nobel laureate; I act in mirrors and foggy bus windows and graffiti smiles in store aisles and store away files of albums and memories longingly.

I am not tired until all the “I’m not”s and hasty U-turns on the highway catch up to me; groping and grasping for words under skirts I misheard and blurred and burnt and uninspired.

I watch the Canadian geese migrate and mate in the sky overhead, but as to why I wish I knew the hate of resigned fate or emotion and notion but am sure we all die eventually.

And when my eye catches in storefront reflections it beckons forth a girl with my inflections but my flesh is deceiving: I’m grieving for the loss of a child who’s screaming but still here within me.

My blonde hair and blue eyes are denied catechisms for a wizened race, a dying face, a new age and I feel fake, hands tied no mistake, if I don’t scream I’ll break.

One day I’ll cry by roadsides, rivers, punch the snow and the broken scissors and shred my hair and tear the glaring neons then fall silent and quiet: it’s not right to make nothing but violence.

I claim to want a safe world for my unborn children, solutions, deactivated munitions, a safe haven, but I’m still young and drunk on beauty and promise and teenage oblivion and haven’t decided yet if I believe in heaven.

So why, you scream? Why care about ANYTHING if begging and lending a hand unplanned never stopped such a war or repositioned a planet? I don’t have the answers but I raise my hand when my name is called in class for I can’t sit quiet.

But I’ll answer as the deep bass punching through my grandmother’s next-door-neighbors’ walls and the ochre sunset on the sugarbush.

Then I’ll lift my head from the lake on a fall afternoon, the kind when the water is warmer than air, swimming without care of the depths, deep breaths, I dream of hope.

And I am NOT: I rise above shouting voices and noises as steam from a cup of tea in the snow, above self-image and anger and hating something new each day...

I will continue and live and laugh and dream and and forgive and give hope not despite but for the chaos of it all and the tumbling ocean breath.

I am fifteen years old this New Years’ Day: I’ll wait for snow and pray it to stay this way, always. 

I love being alive. I love the sun. I love the color yellow. I love fire and marshmallows. I love my world, I love you, I love dancing through the rain, I love dreaming, I love breathing, I love despite the pain, I love it all the same.