XIII. The boy behind the gas station counter, he’s got eyes the kind of blue that grows insomniacs and a book behind his back the same way people carry weapons and things that kill. He looks at everything with the shame of a dreamer, and I want to tell him I understand. That on the worst of days I worry about dying a dreamer too, and that failure is a wild, cancerous thing I’ll never find a cure for. I want to tell him If you let me, I could make one hell of a poem out of you, that failure is a wild thing but that the poetry in him is savage with red stained teeth. 

XIV. Failure looks like this. Success looks like a crowded funeral and a complete stranger on their knees with a hurricane through their bones. This hurricane, it’s me, a warring whisper of everything I once was (everything I once wrote) and everything I will continue to be. I am just trying to become something permanent. I am just looking to become something permanent. I want to tell him that, the boy behind the gas station counter, the young mom by the bus stop who closes her eyes and sings under her breath like she’s a star, and the house wife at the edge of town with Italy growing on the palm of her hand and Australia behind her heart. I want to tell them that it’s okay — who even cares about Shakespeare and Marilyn Monroe and Marco Polo anyway — that we’re all pretty, twisted poems anyway. I want to tell them that I am not ashamed of the universe behind my eyelids or of the way I can look at a stranger and dig metaphors and rhymes from the things they want buried, but that if I die just another dreamer I will shame this godawful Earth for turning me into one.