LIVE

I desperately need to study for midterms. It's midnight and I'm still sick. I'm listening to Coldplay songs I first heard back home.
Today we went to New York City, and I wrote some poetry. I feel stuck again, as though wading in a black-and-white swamp, and it would be so easy to move so little and reenter the world of light and color... But I cannot.
So live, I say. Live deep, like Thoreau said, and suck out all the marrow of life. Live until you've filled up your soul to the brim with light and die with the sun escaping from your skin.
It's cold, the winter. It's all frozen and we cannot move because where I live it's not allowed to be different. I'd rather have the sharp pain of ice than the numbing soft cold of snow. If it were summer, I would melt into the background and the sun would burn my skin. Spring will only bring pollen and faded pink to the fields. Fall sings a desperate song of color, screaming that we will all die like the world does in winter, with all our regrets open on the ground.
So I will leave this place, and I will live, live until every drop of life is gone from the fruit of it.
In this train of thought, I give you two poems I wrote today, Change Lanes and People. The first one I thought of in the Holland Tunnel, and YES, I know it's dangerous and illegal to change lanes in a tunnel. It's an effing metaphor, people.

Change Lanes

Change lanes

Don’t you want to change lanes?

It would be so easy

To make the slightest turn of the wheel

And change lanes

Stay in lane, they say

Stay in lane

That’s all the road says

Stay in lane

Devil red lights

Piercing horn shrieks

They’re there to warn you

If you don’t change now,

you’ll never change

Doesn’t that scare you?

It scares me.

The next one came out of me while we were stuck in traffic at night and I was looking out at the window at a man standing at a door alone and watching the world.

People

People

Waiting in the door

Waiting for the light to change

Waiting for the bus to come

Waiting for him to come home

Waiting for death

Waiting for life

Waiting for eternity to end

Waiting for a taxi

Waiting for love

Waiting for a plane

Waiting for a friend

Waiting at the door

Well, I say

Open the door.

Because life’s waiting for you

Not the other way around.

So live.

From your needing-to-study-for-Algebra-2-now, quite-alive poet,

magic*esi