Eternal Unrest.

When death stretches your eyelids,
so tight you don’t have time to rewind,
to have tea with your demons,
to repent and regret and relinquish yourself, 
they stay rigoured,
a forced awakening of your last moments. 

Only a life of sin would force your eyes open upon death, as if to say,
“watch yourself burn.”  

An afterlife of eternal unrest,
reserved for the wicked. 

the tradeoff for maturity.

I gave up all my childhood relics too early. 
I refused my dolls, my stuffed animals, my notebooks full of novel ideas, 
to swallow maturity instead. 

I was sooner than ready ushered into adulthood, 
to wear the mark of maturity ripe on my flat chest. 
Every “you’re so mature” proclaimed from an adult singed it deeper into my flesh. 
The scar soothed my loss. 

Yet, I was not welcome in adult spaces. 
I was hushed and spoken over, my emotions belittled, 
contrived in the twilight zone of being a child in years, but not in feeling. 

Now, I am an adult in years only. 
In feeling, perhaps a quiet, old matriarch whose hands are calloused with past lives. 

But I have danced for many years in the arms of apparent maturity, 
surely I should be a natural? 

I am anything but. 
The dance is awkward and clumsy, and my teacher is absent. 
I traded the precious performance of childhood for adult approval. 

And now? I don’t know how to dance. 

Women

I love women who are hard, who are calloused, whose fingertips are yellowed from cigarettes, who never divulges into their vulnerabilities until they give you little conversational snippets that you don’t dare pry into, who are aggresively maternal regardless of if they have children or not, who are rough and tactile and smart. 

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