My Kaleidoscopic Life

My Kaleidoscopic Life:
(written April 15th, 2005, age 13, on my "childhood". With four more years of perspective, I've added another stanza.)

Princess Jasmine stares at me
with her pupils of sea green plastic gems.
She looks happy, after eight years in closets and boxes.
She couldn't see the dark, with her plastic gem eyes,
and a painted smile on her face.

A disgustingly incorrect Chinese doll.
Her feet are so small.
Clearly bound.
No wonder she cannot balance when I put her down.
She wears a yellow decorated dress.
Was yellow not forbidden for anyone but the emperor?

I pick up a plastic pink purse.
It is Pseudo Leather.
Has three pennies inside.
I pretended I was rich.
And I was, rich in mind.

Only one page in a spy notebook is written on.
"I see a teenage girl riding on skates
Wearing a white sweater,
She is wearing black gloves and a hat."
Who was I documenting? Why did I care?
Who is she now?

Woven shoes I could not wait to grow into when I was three.
Woven shoes I never wore until I was too old.
Where did this life go?
Someone must have stolen it.

A photo of a preschool class that contained
The first person I ever wanted to marry.
A black boy with a kind smile.
The only name I can remember him by is
Fuzzy Head.
That's what I called him, because of his hair.

Pop songs I wrote but never sung.
Because I never became the Second Grade Britney Spears.
In an acrostic I made, the 'I' stood for 'Innocent'.

Stuffed animals I once loved with all my heart.
Now look to me like starved bits of fluff.
I apologise for their neglect.
I truly mean it too.

Looking through a Kaleidoscope, and turning it at my light,
Someone sends me a perfect metaphor.
It's all physically the same stuff,
But as time rotates,
It will never look the same again.

---

Instead of finding webs in my closet,
I've found a new closet in the web.
And I shuffle through a childhood I didn't know was a childhood.
Finding poems and pictures in pristine preservation,
Creepy how the internet does that.
It makes it hard to draw the line between then and now,
Hard to know when yesterday became yesteryear.
Somehow,
It's too long ago to relate to,
But not long enough to laugh it off.
I'm embarrassed by a lot
Impressed by a bit.
I was writing with a mindset
I don't understand now
And I'm not sure if I understood then.
That ignorance was truly bliss.
Which begs the question,
when will I look back on this?