“

We all wanted that high school sweetheart
We wanted to be young in the fifties with meatloafs and sock hops
and lawns so perfect they looked like Clark Gable was kissing them

We wanted to be thirteen and alive and meet a girl that was thirteen and alive 
and walk with her past the grandstands
to sit and hold hands with to sit and kiss with to sit and sit with
but that never happened

We wanted to be poor but not too poor
connecting this country like Kerouac and thumbs
winking at small town waitresses
pulling them into back seats and trailer park homes
where the two of you would find passion expanding 
between the locking of your bones
and morning would come to find you out on the road
with your pockets empty but for your hands
but your hands they’d be overflowing with your soul
but that’s not what happened

We once climbed into beds like the day was a hard mountain 
and the sheets were a valley where dinosaurs still lived
and how we would explore them with a flashlight
catching them between pages and pictures 
of triceratops and brontosauruses
but even he was opened up with the smoke of the houses 
on the corners we once climbed through
the streets and footballs with which we once threw
the school desks upon which we once drew 
the windows that sat open through which we once flew 
before the outside world 
of parking spaces and dead friends came flooding on in
and we forgot what we wanted 
and became what we become:
waitresses and bartenders
city employees and temp positions
grown children and dead adults
we are junkies and one kiss poems
and we cry the stars

We write our scars onto dumpsters and electric boxes
because the only thing we can hear is our hearts
and the only ones listening are the streets
to the blood that breathes through the letters we leave
we try to rise up out of these burning buildings
but instead get buried somewhere beneath
because I know my life my life is a high school kid’s notebook
that kid that goes back and forth between school and home
stacking the letters and the pictures
into sentences that save him 
stacked too close for anyone outside of his own imagination to read
because it’s through the ink that his heart beats
that his heart breathes

And we all just wanted to just write these notes:
check if you like me check if you don’t 
check if you’ll date me check if you won’t
because we all wanted the love songs to be true
and we all loved dinosaurs once
and we all wanted the stars 
to hold our hands to lick the teeth to fuck us 
but they end up fucking us

So let your smile twist 
like my heart dancing precariously on the edge of my finger tips
staining them that same high school kid
licking his thoughts using his sharpie tip 
writing: 
I WUZ HERE
I wuz here motherfuckers
and ain’t none of yall can write that in the spot that I just wrote it in 
I am here motherfucker
and we all here motherfucker
and we all motherfuckers motherfucker
because every breath I give brings me a second closer 
to the day that my mother may die
and every breath I take takes me a second further 
from the moment she caught my father’s eye
because every word I carry is another stone to put into place 
in the foundation I’m building to ease the days 
and help erase something I never saw:
what all of us wanted and what none of us got
what we all had and have and what we all forgot
that we all became something
and it may not be what we once thought it’d be when we were kids
but something is still something
and like some cats say
something’s better then nothing
feet are smarter than an engine
dreams are stronger than thighs
and questions are the only answers we need 
to know that we’re still as alive as the time when I held the mind of a child
asking why is 2 +3 equal to 5? 
Where do people go when they die?
What made the beauty of the moon? the beauty of the sea? 
Did that beauty make you did that beauty make me?
Will it make me something? 
Will I be something
Am I something?
And the answer comes:

I already am
I always was
and you still have time to be.

”

—	Anis Mojgani, Here Am I