Foxes & Wolves

I wondered back then
A long time ago
At fourteen in middle school
A year before the quinceanera I never had
Where I’d be later in life

Everyone my age left middle school
and their teens early
My girlz grew up way too fast

String bikinis
Hickeys on tummies
Laughing in detention
Fights in the restroom
at school or the movie theater

Wasn’t my thing though, never was

I wasn’t scared of fighting
but my mother was a different story
And my friends knew it
They didn’t have to answer to her
I did
 
But makeup was okay
So I’d help reapply
black eyeliner afterwards
The red pencil one
We’d melt the tip with a lighter
cause it was cool as fuck

God I missed them in high school

We were all baby foxes
back then just living
until it was time
to go home

To our dens

And once there
I’d daydream
If I’d survive my neighborhood
It’s dark side
How it perseveres
Like a beast’s underbelly
Always wanting to be fed with a rumble

So many raids
I remember Lenny telling me once
"When they come they’re
going to earn their paycheck"
And they did
It took three to drag him
handcuffed into the cop car

He howled with fearless
adrenaline the whole time
Like a handcuffed wolf
He came from a family of them
The runt that grew into the alpha

It’s odd watching neighbors
you used to play hide and seek
with grow into dangerous people

And I know now
Years later
Why it never appealed to me
That loop
That chaos
The inside of it

I realized I was too smart for it
I’d learned my surroundings well
Much more the observer
on the outside of it

Always learning what not to do
I outsmarted the echoes
Refusing to be a sad story
In shades of red
Like a fox