Dear Time,

Let’s melt under swimming pool skies.

You spill out from under me

seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-

For once,

Let’s stay.

I’ll fish my baby fingers through 

towers of green,

And believe the greatest pain in life

Is a scraped knee.

Please.

Lend me a childhood

Before I leave it.

I spent those days in

Irreverent misery.

Bitterly longing

the saturated existence

of popsicle summers.

I prayed for someone to make me lunches.

I prayed to be included in laughter

and then

I didn’t.

I emptied out every feeling.

Listless devotion.

But their stares

Bore shivers of static.

Lucid nightmare,

Spinning dusk to dawn.

I wore calmness in the calamity,

Hiding breathless.

But the silence was drowning.

It bashed the drum of my chest.

“You were just unlucky.”

But why?

What was so wrong with me?

To be stomped into pieces,

Less than nothing.

Everyday wreaked 

havoc on my bones.

Every word 

diminished my soul.

You caged my eyes 

in a haze.

As tears trickled to my toes.

I always thought 

my childhood was normal.

No one “remembers”

With teeth lacquered in lie,

But I see you.

Spit flying tantrum.

Kick and scream like the adult you are

While I scrub your plate.

I’m contentedly counting

...

Until our time is up.