Today you are a girl,
So you stuff your sister's bra,
3 tissue boxes are casualties,
In your crusade for beauty.
As you apply lipstick,
In front of our cracking mirror,
I mention that this is the 5th time this week,
You've paraded yourself in miniskirts and hooped earrings,
And I wouldn't mind normally,
But lately,
Perfume has begun to smell like gunpowder.
Today you are a boy,
So you dust off your abandoned wifebeater,
And rub your ignored adam's apple gingerly.
As you apply shaving cream,
In front of our cracking mirror,
I mention that your unnaturally deepened voice,
Sounds like a bad imitation,
Of a butterfly wearing bea
Visions of grammar nazis,
armed with steam-powered shotguns,
run amok atop my knitted eyebrows,
firing away at my sentence fragments,
all the while screaming,
real bloodcurdling screams,
and these war cries become,
a demented chorus,
the choir of internal torment,
thickly accented voices yelling in unison,
until after I hurl my pencil down,
crumple the sheets and dispose of the evidence,
they begin to simmer,
the infernal lullaby rendering me drowsy,
and the shouts become rasping,
merely waiting for me to dare attempt,
another written work without them.