I wrote this at midnight on my eighteenth birthday.

A road full of potholes and cracks in the concrete.

Dreams fly around me, their siren call luring me,

Haunting me with lost promises and razor-edged smiles.

A lifetime stretches before me—at the end of the rainbow,

Beyond the final hill and the last tears shed,

There waits for me

Something grand.

My heart knows this; it cannot all be bad.

Surely eventually the sun shall rise, spread forth its light—

And I shall trudge on.

I turned eighteen today, after all—

Let me keep my dreams.