cop-out grey, lax grey, depression grey, dead grey.

For a pained, shy girl, another mistaken notion–to find others
stuck in the same new mess; to share with
the secretive thriving colours still pulsing tiny inside.

And, why not? My lips were healthy and
hot like cherries, evidenced
in the remnants of slick Vaseline passion smeared on the mirror.

Pretending. Just pretending.
Because my mouth had no voice in the presence
of the few boys who wanted me

driving in their rusty cars to nowhere, grey exhaust
the perfume we wore as we panted and heavy petted in the backseat.
My small body was without a tongue.

It was while performing these delinquencies
a part of me broke free
flew out the rolled down window
weaved with the waving telephone wires
sat with the golden sun steeping in the harbour
as words seemed to seep from my mouth, rise and moth flit the air.
I listened to them whisper to the water
soon the colour of cold red stars, watched my words
dissolve into pale blue mist over the still silvered surface,
into the soft slow autumn evening among

the many evenings I sat in the orange upholstered chair
alone in the corner where I read for hours, my stick bare legs folded
over the brown arms.

The sharp scent of tobacco.
Pica: plagued by anemia, my desire to lick ashes from the crystal ashtray.
Plagued by the light as air touches on my shoulder by no one there.
When I finally saw her, she was following me in the hall mirror.
She held a cigarette between bone thin fingers
her pale face, my pale face.

And the grey bearded old man, the town tramp wearing a cracked monocle
caught peering one morning in my bedroom window
watching as I put on my thick beige leotards
and frantically tried to hid the embarrassing elephantine wrinkles
forming around my ankles.

And wading to school through my own emptiness
transient eyes behind dull draped windows, watching.
The gasps of disembodied voices from dark houses; their laughter raucous
over the skeleton girl.

And the sweet plastic smell of ink.
While sunlight, a roiling stream down the yellow classroom wall; risque
purple eyed violets peeking under a wafting white curtain; watch
how the girl from the mirror bends close over her notebook, long
dark hair hiding her face, and writes
the beginning to a colourful end
to the dim grey travesty she titles, Adolescence.