Age

I was a child for a time--
              a short time indeed.
'Twas but a decade--no more, much
less.

Then the battle began,
splitting    fam  ily    in half
as we screamed our
teenage riots,
post-menopausal madness,
and unmeddling silence,
our crimson words spilled
       in the wake.

And awaken I did
from the lifelessness of childhood,
from the last           grasp
of the past,

I saw--
               me.

Barely a woman, only a child;
what had happened to me?

Same age,
      same class,
            same dress,
                   same     old     place.

This
is high school?

It was a place for kids
bent over others' papers,
              seesawing
to their own,
                      back
              and
                      forth.

Angsty and anxious
over last-buzzer three-pointers,
impossible touchdowns,
and the third claim of
"He loves me" that week.

These
Are my classmates?

Children they were,
        crying,
roaring at the stupid parents
keeping the candy out of reach.

I scoffed at their blinders,
made up of this week's slumber party
soap opera
and last week's hormone fashion
and who cares what Brad Pitt is doing?

Ah, the English teachers knew--
they saw the empty puddles,
massing together to form one large,
yet still shallow,
                               POOL
of inconsequence.

I was a rain
                     drop
cast out by the cloud:
the crowd.

And yet, people didn't see me;
they saw the baby-fat face,
the acne battle scars,
a young'un           pining
for the treatment of adulthood.

They didn't see
the old and wrinkled brain,
the tired lines of age;
no, not the loss
of inner child cut
               down
so long before.

The mirror claims youth--
how am I still here,
this unwilling immortal
whose time will never come?

My mind is old,
but my body is young!

Neither nighttime walks of goading fate,
neither elements 92 or 98
nor the
         rays
of cesium
will show the clock as late.

Though, sometimes these hands are like my
                the-
      over-          hill      parents',
the skin dry and cracked,
flaking off like the snow on my hair--
the skin a taut drumhead
upon which my pencil beats
daily--

the only evidence
of my aging inner eye.