Good Reads - No Extreme Content

I think I came screaming from the womb    
with an chronic case of      
what-the-hell-ever.      
And that was mostly how  
it's been until you showed up.  
     
When I was in kindergarten,      
we were coloring the ditto sheet      
with an apple on it,      
for the letter A.      
     
All of the kids colored theirs red      
with green leaves.      
But I liked yellow apples,      
and green apples,      
and red apples,      
so I made a striped apple,      
with all three colors sort of slipshod      
and bleeding outside of the lines      
in a merry visual cacophony;      
I made the leaves brown.      
     
The other three kids at my coloring table      
laughed at me.      
I was weird,      
because apples aren't striped,      
and because my coloring was wrong.        
     
When I was 16, on a whim,      
some girls and I
drove an hour to St. Augustine,      
crammed like sardines in a 1986 Chevette      
with no air conditioning,      
to eat hand-churned ice cream      
and smoke really good cigars,      
until everyone puked except me      
and my girl T.      
     
As I sat there, puffing a cigar,      
taking in the tourist sites and the      
Florida skyline,      
eating the history,      
the street artists,      
and the man in dreadlocks singing      
a U2 song like a bohemian dream      
with an open guitar case in front of him,      
and I knew I could live forever      
     
I wished then I was old enough to buy      
whiskey for the cigar,      
or had the foresight to      
steal some from my gramps,      
and a man stopped dead and said,      
and I swear this is true:      
"The only other woman I've ever seen      
smoke a cigar is my wife."      
     
I never learned about boundaries,      
and my light is more beautiful for it.      
So everything in me screams      
to break these arbitrary rules  
you showed up with.      
 
I think of the street artists,      
and I wonder if I'll live forever.      
     
I wish I never      
(cared)      
that you colored      
your apples  
striped.      
     
     
 

"None of the answers of my pious preceptors would satisfy me, and my demands that they cease taking things for granted quite upset them. Close reasoning was something new in their little world of Semitic mythology." - H. P. Lovecraft  

Read to me the lesson  
and I'll memorise the words,  
sing to me the standard songs  
and I'll recall the tune...  
 
The stories told  
time and time again  
create a world  
as wholly and as magically  
 
as when the eternal hands crafted  
sea, and sky, and soil.  
The Book is a door  
and the Word is a candle  
 
lighting the dark room beyond.  
When I am close to Thee,  
then I am close to a place  
where light charges the bones.  
 
So read to me the lesson  
and I'll memorise the words,  
sing to me the standard songs  
and I'll recall the tune...