CAVITIES / EARLY SUMMER
sometimes my lungs flood with tragedy
sometimes my ribs rot and collapse, cave in
to the cavity of a hollow heart
carved out
by those sickly, sugared love songs.
this sweet-tooth of mine
will be my death.
if i’m not gone already, that is-
sometimes i like to imagine that i am
just a ghost glimpsing through the veil,
a visitor in a life,
a golden, lost body,
that isn’t mine.
that would explain a lot,
i think.
the absence
the disconnect
but no;
this was not a murder, but a metamorphosis.
i can see the sculpture of my skin
outlined in the suffocating heat,
buzzing in the thick air.
shoulders weary,
head down. i can hear the echoes
of my past self,
he shadows me as i move through
these fields, these halls, these echoes
of her, shaking through
my life, causing tremors,
ripples,
through the flow of reality.
he hesitates
when i pass you.
that sweet smile of yours,
my undoing.
sometimes i unravel when the sun casts its gold against these tile floors
sometimes when it hurls itself across the classroom walls,
across my skin,
my hands,
my fourteen-year-old eyes.
my maybe fourteen-year-old eyes.
sometimes i feel that,
this fourteen.
sleepless,
shining,
sweet-toothed fourteen.
sometimes i feel more than that,
or less;
thoughts that are not mine,
feelings that i have no right to.
still,
this is a fourteen years body
filling with love,
with pain,
loss leaking through my pupils.
sometimes this sweet-tooth of mine leaves me
rotting
to the core.
sickness in the midday glory, these dandelions
watered by my weeping. these footsteps in the grass halt;
i am flying above the storm clouds.
this sulphur eye of the hurricane,
this moment of almost-peace.
this is not how my story will end.
this is not when.
i refuse to be another teenage tragedy.
i won’t fall in love with this honeycombed, sun-speckled
syrup-steeped, poisoned, perfect, horrible
image of youth.
i won’t fall in love with you.
APOLLO X. SMITH
(@boyeternal on instagram. feel free to suggest edits, and thank you thank you thank you for reading.)