It Sinks

I should really start doing things.

Whatever those are.

I could really do things, like read half a book or browse for Gorillaz music, or try to think about what would happen to my favorite character if he lived where I am. And I can be other things, like someone dangerously paranoid or a neighbor. I could schedule my life - make fancy and tacky predictions, pretend I could recite a speech about the events of tomorrow; dice my life into phases, episodes, seasons, books, stanzas, quotations, epiphanies; salvage all the happy thoughts into a bookmark and dare to see where I've stopped last time.

Empire Ants

What if I do find purpose? What if I actually find the concept of life's labyrinthine circus (maybe in a mahogany cabinet or in the passion of someone else's manifest dedication)? But what if all we are are broken bones in quiet parentheses - conducive, scarfing down all the noise and trouble - or worn-out baby shoes resting in the dump? I know nothing but the imagery of constellations like pop cola on my tongue (easy and sizzling and all but fantasy in my head, idyllic as if watching a picturesque field from a rocking chair) and how inconveniently hot and stuffy long-sleeved uniforms are capable of being.

The cubby-holes are powdered with chalk dust. Some retain textbooks haphazardly squeezed onto crusty layers of envelopes. The walls are race tracks on the sun meeting up with full blue traces, blue and yellow wound trim and nice to resemble the academy's facade - gates that steel against intruders and hallways frosted with mustard ribbon (a paunchy American's cheeks, the skin extending from one end to another). In the classroom, light ricochets off the exam folders. The fan orbits and my paper waves at it against my hands. My classmates are playful, and together they emit a raucous chatter. A din rises in fluctuating intensity; laughter unravels in spaces of corners, almost a cacophony as everybody else either giggles or mock-reprimands.

Everything has an affable concordance within themselves, but we are all an oxymoron, we are all phenomena, monsters watching through screen doors, magic but real. We are resilient warriors, marching forward in war of change, and as long as life grows I am there to see the Polaroid gray out and the leaves spin through the air. I am there to hear the echoes of shrill friendship and hostility, slipping through chairs the color of royal blue.

I could be here, like you, to crack the codes and fireworks in the marrows secluded in parentheses, or I could be here to make up silhouettes of worlds this earth will never know (because they are indecipherable scribbles shattering into the faintest Big Bang - like truth and fact and theory and diagnosis and smudges parading across the blackboard before eroding into particles cutting through the crystalline air).

And I think
you are
cutest
when you let
yourself 
smile.