My inner child

is draped in holiday lights
riding on the clock
so she will never be late
she lives in the the little box of secrets
i keep in the back of my closet
her voice is the gravel i learned to ride my bike on.
she smells like the lullaby they used to sing me to sleep
but only in the summer time
when we had to close the curtains to make night appear

her eyes are the color of crunching leaves
her smile is three thousand grains of sand
and sometimes i worry if she speaks
it will all fall away
through the cracks the dry skin carves into her lips
and leave the beach telling its naked secrets

sometimes my inner child is naughty.
she lets desire take its course
and when she realizes what she has done
she runs
with pieces of road still rattling in her combat boots.
She was always the good one, wasn't she?
The one who knew the difference between the sides of the scale?

Now though all she does is try to even it all out

Once though she remembered
a time when we laughed
when the swing still went high enough to be wings
carried us to the tops of trees
and we flew away into forever.
Before we knew what lips really felt like.
and before we saw the rips
that this time safety pins cant fix.