ODE TO TEENAGERS

Teenagers are terrible roommates but they’re unbroken. 

Teenagers hear music with more emotional surface area 

to their ears than adults.

Teenagers really hear you especially when it’s impossible 

for them to hear you.

Today this poem is bursting sloppily out of me 

because I’m happy with teenagers.

Teenagers get drunk, have sex and do drugs 

but that’s not why I like them. 

Teenagers write poems and spit sick bars into the mics I hand them, 

into the mics the public library puts batteries in. 

Teenagers in South Central New Mexico put the card in to the ATM of our hearts 

because teenagers are concerned with banking. 

Teenagers have little banks in their eyes 

accepting deposits in all forms, in all smells, 

deposits that tingle from your toes up your spine, 

intimate deposits, teenagers might get uncomfortable 

when a 50-year-old white man from Alabama 

says “intimate deposits”.

Teenagers get driven to the poetry reading in a dark gray minivan by their girlfriend.

Teenagers take the night sky and slam it like freshly-squeezed prickly pear juice.

Teenagers work at Caliche’s, Rack Room Shoes and Sonic and are allergic to nuts 

but don’t worry, all the nuts come in little baggies, teenagers probably don’t like 

poems with nuts, especially deez-type nuts. 

I have known 100 teenagers a year since 2001, how many teenagers is that? Infinity teenagers 

is how many. 

Teenagers do not watch Chicago Fire but do run in the middle of the night on sidewalks to city parks

like little flames matriculating into anything but smoke. 

Teenagers wear jeans inside their brains, and sweatshirts inside their feet, in between 

the tiny little foot bones, so many little bones wearing so many little sweatshirts. 

Teenagers don’t mind when things get weird.

Teenagers know by heart: inside one tiny seed, a tree five stories tall. 

Teenagers know the sun is setting. 

Teenagers know the gate is locking. Teenagers will wait to slip behind someone 

who knows the code coming in. 

Teenagers are someone coming in, but I know they’ve been here all along, 

like how the moon still exists even when we don’t see it, like how love 

still floods these streets even though we don’t see it, like how the screams 

of teenagers in poems, like how the screams of teenagers in Young Park, 

like how the screams of teenagers ricochet against the void,

how the screams of teenagers return to us as screams of joy.