High schoolers have one volume:

cacophonous

chatter echoing across concrete

floors and covering your sin of silence.

The May morning sky paled against

your eyes, bluer,

brighter, piercing,

an existential crisis

visceral

as the martyr before the lion,

a scene you clung to until

the docent got nervous

and shooed you away

from the only faithful devotion

you’d show me.

I squander months stretching

your landscape to fit my horizon,

pretending loving strokes

remove all flaws,

but you are a Pollock,

a performance piece

ill-fitted

to the martyr of my teenage

masterpiece.