What I Learned From Being Homecoming Queen

If humankind can hide and say all sorts of things,

and stores can sell knives and ties like lives on strings,

wouldn’t humans inevitably fall agiley ill?

How much easier could it be to take just one more pain pill?

When people claim they care, but they have to ask “who?”

and the world still has to wait to enter emergency rooms,

remember

it might seem unfair and selfish and rude, but

people hide here on Earth, and they need help, too.

Try, for a day, a few ticks of the clock to

put down your lives, go outside, and just walk

to a place you used to know before these new techno nations,

back when we talked face to face and we heard conversations.

Remember what it was like when someone looked at you in the face,

and when they said something sour, their eyes hid behind hate.

What you read on screens now are all twisted and twirled,

but at least you knew then that they weren’t the whole world.

Those people didn’t hide inside of a screen some whoknowswhere

watching you be you and those whoknowswhos didn’t stab you through the air

with keys too far away for you to reach and try to teach them how to fight.

No.

Now the whoknowswhotheyare come hidden by masks of screen light.

Why hide under the blankets with your lives in your hands

when you can write about kingdoms and build castles out of sand?

Take it from me, the girl who went from Outcast to Queen,

and turn off your phony lives. Plug back into your dreams.