The following is a modern poem:

Just a Girl

I’m just a girl, and I know this because I

have said so more times than I can

count. To myself. To others. And then to pieces

of paper that I’ve gone and crammed deep

in past read books, which hold no significant value

to me now, except to serve as a reminder of a pipe

dream that, while friends and activist groups and

even the occasional doctor tell me is less a pipe

dream and more of an attainable and even a currently

present personal truth, is still, I occasion to believe, a pipe

dream.

I’m just a girl who seems to approach life

with a certain flavour of naivety, preaching best

chances and pretending through a still false persona

that I’m living out my own best chance when, in truth,

I am lonely, jobless, possess a shaky sense of direction at

best, and am perpetually questioning my own existence,

all the while fucking up any new friendships or experiences

I might happen to feign to believe could meld into any

daily reality, a perceived reality of which,  I tend to imagine or

hallucinate regularly.

I’m just a girl with an apparent insatiable exigency to

possess some magnitude of jealousy for

other girls whom I tend to perceive as perfect, despite

retaining the certainty that they, too, are likely to be

coping with the same or somewhat similar shit that I

am pretending to conquer by way of suppression, which

is a perfectly effective and acceptable method of dealing

with an issue, because suppression removes the issue from the public

eye, and allows for me to occupy some phony sustenance that is likely

akin to tossing rocks in volcanoes with the intention of never

seeing rocks again, while fully understanding this intent cannot

become reality and will, in truth, create more from that which

was tossed away in the first place.

I’m just a girl, and I believe that, I do, and I hold fast to what,

at times, feels like a fanciful hope, that others might believe me too and,

indeed, strangers do seem to be convinced of my assertion, knowing

no other possibility, and being unable to perceive the doubt

I feel that is less a kind of doubt and more a kind of fear

that I may never be taken seriously, or that that which I still continue to

suppress will never fully find a resting point of internal

satisfaction, wherein I will no longer feel obligated to

satiate my apparent exigency to be jealous of other girls

and, rather, be able to slip loose of the snakeskin label of my being a

fake girl, or perhaps, still further, that there might come a day when

others no longer attach that label while I continue to struggle with

the label and the fear and the feeling that I won’t ever be able to accept

myself, try hard as I might, and that the colloquial ‘it gets better’

means just that, that it must always be a process of becoming

better rather than a process with an identifiable end of the tunnel

that is actually worth fighting to reach.