I know Despair like an old friend who was meant to stay a memory.
A perfectly picked-out grass-stained letting go--

Some fitting loss that spells forward motion
Kinetic energy of my youth still bouncing, rubber
Barely half the height of where it began.

Energy follows rules that aren't ours (unruly child),
Flows out like a late-season public pool, finite but
Rubber is recursive and so is He. 

I'm too young to know Despair, they think I think
Am I too young to see my flaws open wide into trenches filled by sirens, luring,
Pressing sour-sweet kisses up my neck?
Too young to see the future as a vast white nothing?
If it's pale it's a newly-blank canvas, of course.

What happens when the petty differences in my genetics
(expressed randomly and maliciously as they bloom into defect)
Become so predictable every action feels rigged? 

At eighteen (in the same way Juliet was fourteen) 
I haven't yet walked those universal sidewalks 
Toed the toxic-spray lawns
So sticking around is more than courtesy.

But once I know it all
Once my past streches farther than my future
Will I greet Despair like a love I wish I hadn't lost?
Like a beautiful eventuality.

I want the end in my control
On the worst days I don't care when.

I want to claw my hands through his soft, greying skin.
Hold my hair,
Fade my colors, love.
Lie so long against dirt that the pestilent persistent crab grass pokes through
The scourge of suburban lawn perfection, He tells me

Let the love that dares scream its name
The love for warnings and twilights and endings
Grow within