By Lily Bishop

Editors Note: Lily Bishop is a 17 year old senior at Pedro Menendez High School

For nearly six years now
I have been waiting to receive
What in due time will be
My magnum opus

Those first three were a repressed fever dream
Where platonic shadows of my body
Threw punches with desperate hands
Like photosynthesizing leaves
Simultaneously, my spirit sunk deep
Into scalding pots of chamomile tea
And I waited
For God to strike me, like lightning,
With a masterpiece

But with the passing of time
Questions without answers began to manifest
So I became more adverse to getting better
The same way I grew into my father’s sweaters
And now here we are at the dreaded present!

This year I have embarked on an archetypal transition
From innocent to magician
So that I am feigning a mountain
But hidden below the slope
I am only just a mouse, unfoundedly proud
Of my pseudo-intellectual identity
Even though the only metaphor I can conjure
To embody my muse
Is a spiral

And this spiral is carnivorous pollution,
An ant colony creeping through my arteries
This spiral is my ugliness
Draped in needles evergreen
Colonizing the negative space
Where cheap coffee reigns obscene

And while I can clothe myself in ego
My caffeinated stream of consciousness
Loves to be blunt
In the scope of the universe
I am grotesque
A dying sun

But the spiral is only an idol,
Another Sisyphean trial

Yet the worst part of being a writer
Is that I, let alone you, don’t even know what I mean
So I will tarry along
Wearing the crown on my feet
Exploiting each blizzard and drought
Through the scarlet sweat on my brow,
Robbing the sum of my poetic evolution
Until it amounts to a bitter reprieve

You see, it breaks me that I cannot talk bluntly
About the sublime terror that’s been breeding
Without succumbing to your preconception
Of adolescent angst

Now, my archetypal magic
Reduces to only a scheme
Where I confuse euphony for talent
And cacophony for honesty;
This was never a plot for world domination
Just a mistranslation of clarity for dopamine
So extravagant words without significance
Connect like puzzle pieces
And cast lots to decide whether or not
I force a muzzle onto my rationality
For the sake of merging into my fallacies

But if the spiral, my ugliness, my muse
Can still wage war against me
Absurdity becomes a worthy substitute for purpose
And if God’s mercies are new every morning

He may still reveal to me a masterpiece
So that I might be divinely reborn

The promised land waits for me patiently
Where I’ll relearn to love milk and honey;
On the land where God walked
I will create my magnum opus
And reconquer my restless, chameleon heart