grown — a poem

we wore gaudish costumes and spoke with

deviled tongues, pressed against my

back your hand with fingers crossed we

fooled even ourselves wearing masks of both

ambiguity and maturity mixing and rising to the

surface like the bubbles in your rum & coke we

fooled even each other wearing my mother’s heels and

your father’s tie we spoke of a future together your

job and my career drenched in wine-stained dreams from the

bottle you bought that morning, echoing through the scratches on

my record player we played house as well as we

knew how to, hiding our emotions like cards behind sleeves and

forgotten under the tables we stacked, we spun our feelings like the

webs we then destroyed, never talking too loudly with hushed voices we

never spoke out of turn we

fooled even me as I grew into my mother’s face I

worried about a future together; your absence clear and your

presence intoxicated and captivating we were

children playing with matches and burning ourselves with

the fire but never learning, we

fooled even who we were before, becoming two people who

spoke in ancient riddles and spoke with the mystery of the

moonlight and cheated the clocks we

grew into each other but we never grew

up. having sleepovers and breaking promises we

pointed at the stars and wished on the clouds that

passed the moon we gazed with childlike eyes at

every possibility that was too high for us to reach but

we grabbed anyway, watching it all crumble and fall

down slipping through our fingers we shattered our own

illusion and tore through who we

were content with pretending to be.