Sunrise
Updated: Dec 31, 2020

Is this what these years should be?
Thigh scraped from the hard plastic of my windowsill
pressing cruelly into my leg as slide across it slow
and drop into the dirt
I watch the sleepless neighbors through glowing boxes
and see their stuttering lights in the sky
Hold a firefly between my fingers and breathe in
a smile and a light feeling
I am lifted by a million glowing things
My foot is half asleep by the time he’s here
The man too old to be sneaking around like this
(or maybe just old enough––it seems like
we’ve all been growing backwards
Undoing systematic knots in our chests and bones
tugging at them like pocketed tangles of earbuds)
We want to blast the music
I whisper to him as though we’ll never see daylight
And that’s what this is
isn’t it?––
the last chance before dawn
to ignore the difference between source and shadow
to be nothing but one of a million silhouettes
No shoulds or plans or consequences––just
holding a near stranger in my arms
A smile and a light feeling
As the birds begin to sing I ask if he remembers
the lark and the nightingale
he does
But we are not star crossed and the night is no tomb
so he kicks off his skateboard
and I bruise my other thigh on the belligerent window
I wonder how the whispering brightness
now spilling over the lawns in blue gray
grew from the electric darkness of
just a lifetime ago
I doubt that all inevitable things are so beautiful
#growingup #younglove #teen #poetry #romance #romeoandjuliet #sunrise