14
…is louder than airhorns and
chatters in cheeky dolphin, endlessly; fluent,
fluid squeals rising and falling like waves on the ocean
punctuated by hoots and giggles, the squawking of seagulls.
14 is a hedgehog, growing into a porcupine, rattling those
long, quivering quills with every step while,
really, she is just
gnawing on yet another peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich, leaving little purple grape-prints all through the house, after, because oblivious
(Why would anyone notice the sticking of sock to floor?)
(How could anyone not??)
14 clings like a tree-sloth with painted fingernails to the tattered vestiges of childhood, where everything was done, is done, by automatons and house-droids and fairies hiding in the corners,
while simultaneously claiming the gamine and gangly-legged independence of a juvenile zebra, knock-kneed and stretching, prancing, dancing across the grasslands of clothing-strewn carpet for the sheer joy of motion, the active denial of gravity —
14 is a lead-booted butterfly, hoisting her
newly un-caterpillared self up into the air on
unfinished wings, colliding
with the door-frame, tripping over
pockets of air, falling, stumbling,
crawling away to give up and hide, fighting to rise, slowly
coming back again, because the nectar that awaits
(a weird, nonsensical mix of processed sugar, salt, chocolate, loud screams, fake cheese, sour powder, funny faces, styrofoam marshmallows, fruity smells, huge burps and fizzy bubbles)
is simply too powerful to resist
(but also, an ineffective lure)
this screamingly chartreuse child with her fluorescent orange rages,
her sullen purple silences that go on for days and days,
her sudden flashbursts of electric-blue and broiling acidic flood of
yellow-flaring solar chaos, this child wreaks
outstanding havoc,
breaking the air-raid sirens,
forcing the Emergency Broadcast System to
fire up, to deliver garbled messages and finally collapse under the weight of
the obligatory teenaged eyeroll into
world-deafening static long after the echoes fade —
this child is 14.
14 croons and bops to the latest boy band and cries empathetically over the hurts of other small creatures, snarling like a grizzled she-wolf at the perpetrators of pain,
tries on for size one hundred daily faces, one thousand punchlines, one million points-of-view, selects and settles her own foundations of sensitivity and defiance, a high-speed caricature of possibility in a game of 52 Personality Pick-Up
(14 would die of embarrassment, funereally, under veil, under duress, under the glowering pall and demonstrative angst of great personal drama,
shed glittery and decorative tears of poignant, youthful frustration
if she ever read such things — after spending many hours shouting at the writer, who has grown quite tired, really, of being a lamp-post, a doorstop, a blinking traffic light… at least for today…)
and one day she will be
(from the crucible, cast and captured)
grown.