i'll never be a poet

twenty baby

moon in my mouth right now lick lick lick so stone-cold marble milk lolly ice and mint and gummy and clay roll around taste buds every pinched bitten bump on my tongue what are they called? i don't remember. the moon feels so good to hold in my jaw not sweet just right feels right it belongs here with me in my mouth here separate my tongue from the upper roof that feels like gills icky skeletal i'm not a skeleton i'm alive aren't i? ha ha- don't laugh it will roll out of your swollen cheeks dribbling with moon-minted-milked saliva collect the titrate in jars to come sparkling lunar love potions or like the chewed-up rice wine in that movie i love watching for comfort. i get why the mama birds chew up and kiss their babies with their manna mouths as ravens feed elijah godsent warm and blessed with the same sparkling spit rolled around and chewed up for you for me so it is easy to swallow. i want more easy-to-swallow things i don't want to keep working my jawbone i want to save my baby teeth from all the grunt work and let warm honey slide down my throat in slow ooze sliming the inside with sugary lies. that metronome of a clock keeps beating on it never seems to run out of battery red-rimmed face not even looking me in the eye it doesn't need to i am below its unfeelings and maybe it's because i watched tick tick boom and andrew garfield's jonathan larson was turning thirty and heard a ticking in his head too but dear larson-garfield-miranda what about twenty? i mean i have already tipped over that edge but i want my teens back i don't want to have my face curdle and droop and my back curl and ache and my joints stiffen and break and my mind smoothen with false memories stuck on replay i think i have alreadly lived not a full life but an okay one and i'm super okay with that and i promise this isn't an issue of vanity i just don't want to lay my life in the hands of another. pride holds up my chin in his golden hand and severs my heart strung from my head i am not who i am. i am the mirrored reflection of a shadow in the corner of the earth imprisoned to mimic the shape of the beings walking before me my calloused feet misshapen in the hollow of each footprint left behind. sick monstrosity, i hate the blueprint of humanity you doomed us all from that first bite but we aren't absolved from responsibility and it's not even funny how i am the absolute opposite of whatever earthly paradise i was supposed to be i am more of a hellhound pup with rotten fire breath and a tail between my legs and i cry whee whee whee all the way to my demise hurtling somersaulting falling uncharted unpredictable as a butterfly's flight pattern someone rip off my wings before i do it myself then hang them up on a clotheshanger and wear it on my shoulders for next year's halloween. i don't even celebrate halloween. who are you? i don't like you.