what it was

it was fergie in my best friend's back seat.
drinking my way through classes
and taking painkillers to make it through the hours in my house.
it was my first time playing in powders,
how it tasted so metallic bittersweet, encasing my sinuses in gold pollen.
it was cold fingers crawling up my thighs
and being too easy to say "hold on"
so it was also waking up in a bed that wasn't mine
with a boy (or girl) who wasn't mine
wiping the cobwebs out of the corners of my eyes and saying
good night to the fragile moon
which had documented everything.
it was a nova exploding against my wrist.
it was a wasteland of drunken emo songs and a
neverending cycle of fighting.fucking.fucking.fighting.
like the bad kids do
it was my caved-in stomach and the other boy's lips against it,
being undressed with dark eyes in dark corners,
the carousel by the church and a few hundred emptied bottles left for dead there, much like my dignity,
your fingers down my throat (and your other anatomy).
it was a battleground and the wrists of kings and the constellations on your ceiling and your name on my lips and a few cases of infidelity and interlocking nights spent smoking pot and my bitter poetry and it was open legs-closed eyes and most of all it was
me, at seventeen.