You write:

(1)

For a while it has been the time

Where ten fingers and ten toes

Are not all that are needed to construct

A normal child.

For a while it has been the time

When ten, eleven, twelve years

Is not too young to put on a pedestal

Every youth,

And say to them:

If you look up, you can see

The others, where you should be,

So why have you fallen

So far below them?

(2)

One shoe, two shoe,

Red shoe, blue shoe,

Tall shoe, thin shoe.

How many inches

Can you hid beneath

Your feet

Before you're tall enough

To overlook

The fences they set

To block the females

From a man's world,

If that world

Is not a bedroom?

(3)

Elliot had certainly seen some shit in his days,

It hit the fan in wide variety of different ways,

But this is the kind of shit that stays firmly in place,

That rots on the floor and won't look at his face,

When they tell him his grand daughter's hands

Are too delicate to hold a rifle against

Any future man who should have known better.

(4)

Upstairs, I can hear the trembling piano-forte refrain. It's a song with wings, a baby bird that only needs a few strokes before it's ready to fly on its own, and then it does just that. Sometimes I wonder what it's like to get lost in something, to dig your own grave in the sky and bury yourself deep to find that when you roll over you're lost in heaven. Whenever I try to play music, I think I might be digging to slowly and the wrong way, because all it seems to be getting is harder to appear as if I sustain interest and harder to feel amazed by the way the strings hum against the Ebony. The first time I played it was the kind of symphony that would call the dead to dig deeper into their own graves and the strings on the bow I used to play were severely frayed, but I smiled because it was music and I alone had made it. Now there are books worth of lessons filed in my head. I know which three strokes will get me Bach and which four will bring me Mozart but I can't call up the number which will bring me happiness.

(5)

I don't think it's depression, but it's not something I've talked about so I can't know for sure either. The thing that a lot of people seem to forget about being young is that you know you aren't nearly as hopeless as you think you are, you just can't bring yourself to believe it, too. A few days in a week not so long ago there were innumerable tiny and large sadnesses that hung in the air around me like flies and clung to my skin at night and when I awoke I discovered they hadn't been flies at all, but mosquitos, and they sucked everything out of me while I was sleeping.

(6)

I spent all of Saturday looking at things, and while that may not sound so enormous to most in the end it was an elephant for me. Another thing people forget about being young is that sometimes you expect more of yourself than the grownups do, and maybe it was always unreasonable to have even the wish that I could do all those same impressive things like those people– But scratch that, it wasn't a wish, it was a want, and from the age of three you always know there's a difference. Then again, the line is blurred upon which I stand: Do I wish I could do what those people did, or do I want to do what those people did? I'm barely a blip in time and already I'm in a canyon, looking up and to the sides, trying to decide which way to go.

(7)

I bet inside all of this is a life lesson, and I suspect that I already know what it is, but knowing something and having learned it are two very different things.

(8)

I can't really say I wish I were Peter Pan, because I'd hate to be stuck at this age forever. I'm more of a Holden Caulfield, really. Even though I already know it I want someone to tell me how it'll all be okay in the end.