You Are Fifteen and Still Afraid

that God can see you masturbate,

still a hollow husk of boy getting thinner in the mirror

while worry whittles you down to hunger.

You’re hungry. You’re afraid of what you want:

boys blued beneath a summer moon.

You are like an insect running a collision course for the light.

Jax, I want to tell you a story

about Robby D. smoking vanilla vape in the children’s park,

small clouds of disaster fumigating through the willow trees,

about young boys learning to love in the silent language of their bodies.

Do you remember that one night?

when the air was thick as a river, so you drank

rice wine from a mason jar, then threw it all up.

Your skeleton, quiet, hollow as a flute.

Do you remember how the wind blew through you?

Jax,

we can stop here for a moment,

because it’s a story,

we have to keep going

to the part where you are older.

Robby is gone, and you don’t know the difference

between what you want, and what you’ve got

but you know it’s not the same.

The part where you light seven candles for the Virgin Mary

and an eighth beneath your hand.

It’s midnight, and you can’t stop screaming.

The blue metal of your brain ringing

like an alarm, turning air into emergencies.

I asked you to show me on the doll

how it happened. You stuck its head inside the oven.

There was no doll.

I asked you to show me in the bible what it looked like,

You torched the whole damn thing.

There was no God.

I ask and you never answer.

Jax, I know what you’re afraid of:

quiet lizard pacing through your bones.

I know you want to shed your skin entirely.

I know you’ve dated three men in three years,

and none of them love you anymore.

Hey, look at me.

You’re not alone. You have your entire life inside you.

You have me, reaching through the page to get to you,

every letter a thread, the web of you and I.

You already made it to your future. You can do it again.

Let’s play a game.

Every time you take a breath

you have to live a little longer.

Loser has to learn to win.

I’m not playing.

You’re not listening.

I want you to live

loud enough to wake the dead.

Alec, Omari, Kaylah, Arjun. Jackson,

your dead friends aren’t dead, they’re just living

a little more quickly than you.

Please.

Take your time. Take mine.

You can give it back when you’re done.

—————

Jax Neal is a multidisciplinary poet, choreographer, and performance artist based in Los Angeles, California. Neal’s work often combines vulnerable storytelling with extreme tests of physical and mental endurance. He is a former National Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador selected by the Library of Congress, and an alumni of the First Wave Scholars Program, the only full tuition scholarship for Hip Hop and Spoken Word artists in the world. Neal’s solo exhibition, “The Altarcations” a series of endurance-based performances will debut in Houston, Texas in 2025.