Silent Car Rides

You're busy admiring the leaves today, forgetting they're not the only ones dropping in the cold.

You didn't see the chapel scraping to fill halfway,
                                            or the heartbreak of people smiling through tears.


There's something morbid about little girls in a graveyard.
Something about pink sweaters against pale bodies and taking roses to take them,
                                                                                                              not to put them on the casket.

I've seen too many funerals in my 18 short years.
The first time I met death was at 7 years old:
and here I thought I paid my dues.

but the painful decay of a hospital is something I haven't learned to deal with,
and I think God will keep giving me silence filled Emergency rooms, until I learn.

the florescent fish in the hallway are the only things that look remotely happy,
but if you take a closer peek, you'll see they're just as miserable as the rest of us.
Cooped up like prisoners in this clown house of grief

Shiny floors and green flashes of life and death. life and death.

 life and death.

Oxygen monitors. Complimentary cheese cubes.
                                                              Questions and prayers that God can't answer.

If you think your few months of college have seasoned you into adulthood,
wait until you hit the grill.

In Loving Memory 

- Jones Kay Christensen -

Cafeteria food

Downturned eyes and fidgeting hands,
pulling at the edge of your shirt to look busy.
Everytime I see bodies who don't fit the media's definition of thin
I worry that I'm seeing people who don't believe they are beautiful.
Who don't believe they are talented, strong, wonderful.

The lies we post on walls across America are starting to tell lies of their own.
Big eyes and a big heart hear mixed messages from a size 0 rack.
Little girls are painting pictures of what shouldn't be there instead of what is.
Little girls who don't believe they are beautiful.
Who don't believe that they should grow up to be big and strong.

Clocks tick like seconds are ants scurrying for crumbs
and we're not doing anything about it.
Crumbs are all anyone eats anymore.
Teenage girls who don't believe they are beautiful.
Who don't feel pretty in a prom dress or a profile picture.

Shifty comments and watery eyes,
They have to believe they are beautiful.
Paper dolls with paper thin waists plaster their pictures across the news
The runway can be so much worse than a plane crash
.

.

A green couch and a checkered shirt, what have I left behind?
We're trying for a normal conversation and when we come up for air all we have is adequate
I was taught you can never be too careful with your words,
But I'm just now learning that careful and tedious have different definitions.
Your voice is strained and mine, forced
And there's enough road between the two of us to make a weekend away inconvenient

 I put my hand on your chest the last time you told me you wanted to dance
and I didn't want to dance
And the aftertaste of a lost moment in the middle of the street is a feeling I can't wash off.

And I've showered for that purpose alone.

The streetlights probably laughed at me
'Kid, You'll regret this.'
and the night was just another night and I went home just the way I do.
But that street is no longer another street.
It's the one where I drop my sister off once a week
and it's the one I never got to dance with you on.

Around 6 o'clock the only people on campus are the ones holding hands with diamonds.
Or the ones that will be soon.
& it's hard not to think about you when the leaves change the same way they did when you let me in.
I remember the canoe date I didn't go on, twice.
And now I believe they're just another street light moment.

It's not so much that I need you,
but the world stopped spinning when you left and I've been dizzy ever since.
You left holes in walls not yet built
and everywhere I go you've have a fingerprint

The color of you chases away my favorite dreams and I wake up to sore eyes and isolation.
Mini March madness and a piano bench perfectly made for two.
It was like the puzzle was our best bet.

I talk about you often and I don't know if it hurts or heals
You puts rivers in the ocean and somehow your water always comes back to you.
I've been washed with the waves on a delicate cycle, just waiting to be put in the dryer.
And I'm ready to come home, but history has a way of deleting itself.