Your boots slide you into high school, snow piles

atop your shoulders, tensed with uncertain hues

of a winter morning. the car will skid to an abrupt halt, the winds

toss you upon the gates.

it is here, in labyrinthine centipedes of hallways,

along rows of lockers like colourful pancakes,

that the beasts would hit upon your unformed mind, thrusting

knowledge damp with the cruelness of melted sundaes, they

will be heaving sundaes themselves, the syrup sill curl atop your

adolescent tongue, lodge in your teeth to blow

gentle sweet songs in your mouth whenever

your lips part to say, “Hey, stop!”

the beasts of high school are not only monsters

whose names are plastered all over- maturity, they are also benevolent 

creatures of heart and grace. yet when the storms drown their graces

they are set loose, upon your dwarf figure five feet tall 

like boys in Lord of the Flies. When

survival are fat posters crawling all over the canteen tables and 

your sanity tips like how they flick your tray with polished fingernails 

over the table to tumble over polished floor, you remember 

the sweet scents of chocolate in your mouth, how 

sweet things do stay, by coincidence or not. in a mouth 

filthy things lurk, behind your tongue, pulsing in your gums,

yet there are good things that reside. so you have to look,

search, follow the scents of warmth, and that is precisely 

how you find your first friend, a gawky boy with huge gums,

a nose like an architect’s failed bridge, eyes like

pools of shaking fear. that’s alright, 

both of you will learn, like learning organic chemistry or equations,

how to plant wheat heaving kindness among the fields of lockers and hallways,

first a trickle of warm connection between you both

then a wild wave of warmth that

rides the sweet scents through high school.