THE THINGS I CARRY

an assignment for ap language, based off of "the things they carried" by tim o'brien

by me, march 2012

I see in her eyes the radiance of a hundred million little women,
All raucously, vividly, tangibly plain.
I see on her shoulders an earthly weight of a bag stuffed with
a notebook, a binder, pencils, and a calculator,
each used to forge the blackheartedly scrupulous war of the “Educated”
the “Erudite” the “Academic” the “Scholastic.”
The moisture dripping down her cheeks now,
Contemplating, masking, hallucinating the ancient weight of
The metronome, the agenda, the wallet of earned bills,
Representing the dynamic tragedy of a life spent preparing for the same life to start.

Frisking through the depths of this weight again, she accidentally finds a
Perfume stick, left there from the day her deodorant ran out,
And she accidentally finds nightmares,
unwelcome and uncontrolled thoughts of her lips on some unlucky dreamboy’s face.
She can’t help it though; she’s only seventeen.

She carries on her shoulders a gray diminishing fading bag, in her hand a textbook,
And on her lips a shame from overbearing self-consciousness,
Down from the tattered, tearing Moochie Mooche Pink on her toenails
Up to the demons crawling across her consciousness.

The dreams are painfully general and the goals are disastrously ordinary.
The piteously common volumes of The Call of the Wild and Of Mice and Men
Bent stuffed pained in the abyss of that bookbag
Parallel the oh-so tragically cyclic life of a girl
Wasted, purgatoried
Within the walls of success, attention, popularity, and people.

I saw her try to shoulder an optimistic façade even when thoughts of uselessness and inextraordinance once again assail her for another brutal Monday.
Fiery red eyes from another concise night snatch her soul away, and the gathering lack of inspiration, not only as she writes this, but also all the time, every time, seems choking,

But the beauty of the breath, the serenity of the sunrise, the immaculately measured
amount of love needed for this soul and heart to function
Astounds her every time she
Giggles but hiccups, looks but sees
A perfectly tubercular sky made by a perfectly perfect pair of Hands.