This is looking back, again.  I had no words for what I was trying to do - and I'm not sure the girls around me would have believed me if I did.  Still, this turned out to be more true than I thought.  If dreams are all we have, they should at least feel true to life.

Verisimilitude

There once was a time
when we could talk,
but now you are all
becoming women
and when I approach
The conversation stops.

 

You turn toward me, 
your faces twisted 
into the plastic smile
reserved for ‘boys’
and you wait
for me to speak.

 

I want to scream
that I have nothing to say,
that I am here to listen.
To learn about the life
I am being denied
by an uncaring world.

 

So that if I can only be me 
in some imagined world,
then at least there would 
be some ring of truth in it.

 

But I am afraid.
And I say nothing.