Days


Days

Day 1
Footsteps through the hall.
I cannot hear them.
Even so, legs dance in graceful synchronicity
with the music in my ears.
My feet oblige, waltzing with Bach.

I sit.
We laugh.
We are so smart
And together we are smarter,
gleeful in the world we
define,
    decipher,
        and determine.
Calculations flow like water
    one plus one
    two plus two
    I love you...
Puns come to mind unheeded
And I laugh because I can.

I stand.
I walk.
Snow floats down
Like fat, white rain
that cannot saturate.
the Winter is a Wonderland,
glazing black and grey with white.

I am
Home.
The washing machine sloshes gently.
The house creaks, talking to itself.
I sit by the fire
A slow deep breath in the quiet
Warmth in my toes and my nose and my fingertips
And a smile on my lips.

Day 2
In my head I turn the binding lock.
The tower of homework hides the ever-ticking clock.
I cling to every minute and watch
it
die.

Stress pangs painfully in my chest
and pervades the air with a hot, suffocating glow.
“Take a breather,” they say… “Before you dive back in.”
I breathe in deeply
and water fills my lungs.
The last minute gasps and
blinks
away.

I stand.
I bike.
Past
black snow like monstrous scales
clinging to trucks grey with dirty salt.

Footsteps through the hall.
I trace this eternal infernal path again, again!
and wear a groove into cool white tiles.
These cold prison walls
I don’t have time for this stuff.

Shoulders lean against the wall, perpendicular.
Heads bow.
Touch breathes away the ice
and warms the metal lockers.
Just because I look away
does not mean I do not see.

I am cold and weak and sick
and have no prince to save my day.
The crowd roars around me…
If I exist in a forest and no one notices, do I even exist at all?

I sit.
Headache.
Tired.
Pain pulses.
Snow glitters in blue sun outside the window,
hurrying to the left, to the right, up.
All around the room, chins press heavily in hands,
eyes are blank,
and heads are full of fuzz.
My head slips into my arms,
the teacher objects,
I sigh and lift my heavy load
again

Day 3
Footsteps through the hall.
I glide above the groove
Cacophony filters in like radio
and all I think is: nothingness.

Thoughts dissolve into being
a step above self conscious
here meet God and Math and Me.
Cool white tiles (no longer cool or white or tiles)
rise up in three dimensions
and float into a fourth.

I sit.
I drive.
Snow dives for the windshield with wild velocity,
white arrows in the dark, dark night,
lightspeed.
My eyes are blank
and the car is quiet.

I stand in the bathroom, toothbrush momentarily forgotten.
I stare into the mirror,
drowning in my eyes.
What’s inside?
Who trapped this consciousness
in a world of form- or am I trapped at all?

I hold my wrist and press my fingers in so that I can feel
the heartbeat, the pulse, the racing blood.
I am still and warm, my breath comes evenly, my heart beats.
I am full of Youth, that wonderful elixir that
flings you down and
lifts you up and
pulls and pushes
until the only hope is Time.

Right now, my feet are on the ground and my heart beats low and deep, and my mind opens.
I feel heartbeats around me, in the room next door, across the ocean.
Some speed up,
some slow down,
some start up for the first time, and
some beat their last beat.
Forever forever forever.
I blink.
My wrist drops.
I reach for my toothbrush.


Oh, dear reader, I lie.
These days are not days.
hour 1, hour 2, hour 3,
the days are eternity
and weeks fly by like seconds.

Footsteps through the deep, cool hall.
I do not hear them.
I float above the groove
green grows through rut and furrow
and I
will never trace this path
again.


---


I’ve noted similarities in my poems, probably because they are all based off my experience, and my experience is pretty static. My experience is High School. This poem synthesizes past poems that describe my experience (“Home,” “Ever-Ticking Clock,” “Take a Breather,” “Cold Prison Walls,” “No Prince,” “White Arrows,” “This Consciousness,” and “Youth”) and ties them together (hopefully seamlessly) with some new writing into one big portrait of “Being Thea.” Even though these are different poems, there are some themes that run through them that make “Days” a unified whole. For example, snow. Snow plays a big role in my life and for half the year, it surrounds me almost every day, especially because I bike to school. During winter, there is also a constant struggle between heat and cold in my own body, and that shows up in a surprising number of my poems.

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