Fitzgerald made millions with his lies.

She's beautiful and she's tan and she's thin and she's a cheerleader.
and I wonder why I always wanted to be her because yesterday she told me her life has always been a mess and that God often chuckles when he throws her a bone because it's filled with more poison than she's ever known and it's supposed to be like an injection,
where they fill you with disease so you learn to fight off infection,
but you're still going to bruise at the seams with a scar that has no recollection    of the aches it put you through in your fragile state.

and when her heart opened up, mine closed. I can feel bad for myself for days but when I see tears un-cried in someone else's eyes I remember that breathing is beautiful,  

and I do it every day. 

I remember that walking on blistered feet means a pair of new shoes and I remember that the cherry tree in the back yard has been growing for years and still has nothing to show for it.


The earth has spun too many times for even the Einsteins of our generation to count and we're all still standing here with grounded heads instead of dizzy hearts. We pay for amusement parks to thrill us and haunted houses to chill us and fifty dollar steaks to fill us but do we realize we're living the American Dream just by the adventure we let our hands run away with in the sand box?



The beach is home to a million grains of sand and seashells to hold those grains together, but we often go to look out at the water we will never touch and the sun that runs away from us time and time again. We roll out our green towels and our classic Fitzgerald's and pretend we are enjoying the best the world can place at our fingertips but what about the snow in the caves where unseen echoes are spilling poetry from their fingertips and I remember, white waters and swimming fish but I can't forget the thrills and chills and fills that imagination and the skyline of reality painted on my heart when I used glasses with a prescription against the negatives.



I remember empty soda bottles that broke the night into a thousand firework shreds and the newspapers that claimed to teach living by a prescription and animation by addictions. 

and I can't tell you how to spell half the words I've written here but I know Google can do that for me and I'm sure I'll keep letting him because there are much better ways to waste this burning lifetime than a dictionary and a red pen. I remember learning that words weren't as important as the pictures they captured and I remember not understanding how you hung a conversation on the wall. But I tried desperately to find the right type of nail at Home Depot.


Thin and tan and beautiful and pom poms. That was the answer to all of life's hardest questions once upon a story book. And I guess it ended up being the cure if you had the right condition, but I never did listen and someone might have once told me about convictions and decisions and explained how a hospital bed and a cherry tree both gulp down remission but    all     I     remember     is death leading me on with a superstition about the beach,

and the meaning behind the words of a dogeared page in my over read Fitzgerald.