Teenagers

The frowned-upon coffee stain on your favorite sweater
The stamp of the all-too bright winter sun pressed to your eyelids
The sharp sliver under your curling crimson fingernail
The crackle of the radio that suppresses a could-have-been-great-song
There's nothing we can do to avoid them
But we sure can crinkle our noses and mumble under our breaths
Cursing and snarling at what we deny to all have been through.
Expected to lose the inconvenience of wide-eyed immaturity,
To Grow Up like an adult, round out our rough edges and shake hands professionally...
While being treated like a speck of dirt,
Like a slip-away feather on your royal violet gown,
Never meeting the sky-arching standards of real adults.
Real adults who are too far above secret handshakes and fantasy stories to twitch a muscle.
We are treated like children, but expected to never act like one.
Constantly shoved into the in-between, pushed and pulled like a stretchy slinky,
Bumbling clumsily down the stairs, where we crumple,
Skin turning to scales of evergreen so putrid and jagged red lines crawling into our eyes.
We claw off our skin, dissolving into our pain. Helpless. Hopeless.
Trapped. "Should-bes" encase us like jail bars...
No wonder we mask ourselves with chunky mascara and highlights and photoshopped curves.
No wonder we eat and breathe sarcasm.
No wonder we tuck ourselves into the blue light of social media.
No wonder we hide away.
We are really just hiding our rage at being treated like a coffee stain
No matter how hard we try to hold the golden staff of maturity and put on that faux violet gown,
It just won't fit.