there are children carving poems into their family trees, and I am still lonely

For the nights we’ve stood hunched over, drenched and sticky in our egogames,
For the hairs pressed between the pages of my journals in the shapes of words saying “Remember that time you gave in,”
For the clouds of smoke we puffed out and called Truth, only to watch ‘em disappear,
For the year
that we all spent tryin’ to chip the paint off our walls, lookin’ for that color we used to love so much, only to find it is ugly and out of date,
For all the hurricanes we tried to catch with butterfly nets,

I am takin’ the leap. Double-back-flip into a cannonball I’m takin’ the leap.
‘Cause I heard there is a mother, whose blood type is lonely,
and a father, with the anger of an eight-hundred pound wolf,
but they gave birth to a daughter who only blinks once an hour,
she’s so caught up with this world. I think she’s holding us all together.
All I can give her is my breath though,
and same goes for Maria.
Remember Maria? She was the janitor at your high school,
dancing with her paint brush on the gymnasium floor when no one was lookin’.
I think she’s holding us all together.

To be continued.