Why Now?

It starts with the noises you make when you chew
Chomps and crunches and loud, obnoxious bites.
It sounds like grinding bones, molars pulling flesh apart
Incisors tearing muscle tissue
Hungry for hearts, for young molded minds
Hungry for pride, hungry for soul
Hungry for tastes about me you don’t even know
It shuffles along to the coughs that you make when you drift near the edge of asleep
Dry, crusty, pale and sickly.
It’s nails on a chalk board, it’s a thorn in my side
It’s excrements of all the things about your lungs I hate
The way they breathe, in and out, in and out
Keeping you alive
It’s all the mucous of your tired life, feeding on my happiness
Feeding on my well being, a being you have never met
A being as a child whose problems you fixed with dolls and bikes
A being who you made cry each night, who you ignored, who you neglected
Who you saw fill with tears and pains and sealed with band aid remedies
As if my heart could be bought so easily
I cannot breathe beneath your heel
I cannot live under your roof of burdened possibilities
I am full of wonderment
And you are full of selfishness
I prayed to make you proud
With crimson lips, a pair you parted you request I rest my gun
For I am no sign, no light, no quantity of life you wish will succeed
By this milestone I do not want you to know me better
I want you to see my successes and wish you had patted my back
Not turned to it with yours
I want you to revel in the glory I have made myself,
The future I have built from scorn and tears and waiting countless hours with wishes that you might see me and recognize I am a person who came from you and wishes you want her heart to be apart of yours.
Why only in my faults and failures did you see me?
Why never in the times I needed arms of comfort, or eyes of warmth did you see my reflection in your own.
Why now, when I am all decided, do you want to be a father?
Why now, when I am done learning right and wrong, do you plant morals?
Why now, when only do I wish I was free of torture you call protecting do you want to escape me of dangers that are you are judging by their covers not their contents?
Why now?
And why not then?
You chose your battles, now was not one of them.
Do not wait for me to cross the finish line, for I will run right past you to the arms of someone who saw me when I neared the ocean
Not now, while I am drowning.