This poem received the 2013 Full Sail Editor’s Award in Poetry and was featured in the school’s art editorial, The Aviator.

 

We have built everything

with the assurances

of our fragile youth—

 

the tiny voice that whispers

like a shadow stretching tight

across the courtyard at dusk;

 

“To be young is to be infinite,”

 

so we press ourselves against

the glass of misbegotten notions,

 

immortality;

elixir of the gods

who cruelly breathed life into

beings of clay—

 

and gave us no true sense of ingrained loss,

(only that which can be earned.)

 

In the evening, ghosts flicker against

my eyelids like moths to the lampshade;

(drawn in by nameless need—

—pushed back into the darkness by pain.)

 

We will often dream of your daring escape;

a Houdini-like endeavor that left

 

gasps in the wake of your tired soul,

 

hurtling through space

to become one bright star,

 

dancing eternally in the distant night.