CW: Word Raccoon wrote some angsty, irreverent song lyrics below. I’m just in charge of her care and feeding, not her writing. Proceed with care.

Saturday night, I, the responsible adult part of this writing operation, went to bed.
Word Raccoon did not.
She stayed up writing poetry. Unsupervised. Again.

I thought she was doing research. Ha!

Sunday morning, I found her with smudged pages, wild hair, and a playlist that could only be described as emo-folk-existential crisis.

“Let me see your hands,” I said.

Yup, red ink and glittered covered.

I asked the obvious question:

“What did you do?”

She didn’t answer.
She just handed me a page that said:

I wanna mosh-pit my soul/Right into the night.
I wanna hit a tornado/ With all of my might.

And:

You gave me dead roses / That you sniffed dry / You love me best / When you watch me cry.

To be clear: sometimes she channels things old and new, things that drift by from outdoors and she’s like, to a passing stranger, “This? Is this yours? I found it floating in a cloud. Like what I did with it?” as people snatch it back and ask Do you mind?

And sometimes, yes, she gets melodramatic and turns the porch light into a metaphor. To be fair, writing on a porch watching darkness fall and solar lights come on and the fireflies in between is pretty romantic. Maybe it’s not her fault. Maybe it’s mine for unwittingly lighting the scene as I was taught to do in creative writing class.

WR is tapping me on the chest.

“You read them wrong; we don’t rhyme poetry. They’re lyrics to a song.”

Oh. Now I get it. Songs are a different matter completely. And this one seems more punk rock than anything. WR…you’re not 17. And what year do you think this is?

To be on the safe side, I’m tweaking her playlist.
(She’d been listening to My Chemical Romance, St. Vincent, and Father John Misty—obviously. She knows she has to be careful with the feeling music.)

I thrust a post-poetry writing kit of her treasures into her hands to keep her otherwise occupied:

• Two pieces of sea glass. (Because one is never enough.)
• A white shell that looks like an ear on one side, the man in the moon on the other
• A piece of quartz that wants to be a fire starter
• A small piece of driftwood that looks like all that remains of a sea tiki bar
• A snack (not pictured, a protein bar; I made her eat it ASAP)
• And a phone queued up to John Green reading e.e. cummings’ “o sweet spontaneous”
  Here’s the link. Don’t tell me you don’t love that poem because…wow!

Before you judge her use of John Green reading poetry again, as soon as you pony up some audio of you reading poetry, dear reader, maybe she won’t need to outsource her poetry needs.

✍️ More Lines from the Chaos Draft of WHAT ARE WE CALLING IT??:

I’m not effing Moses / And even he needed someone / To prop up his arms.

The porch lights flicked on like a lesser sun. / My heart whispered, “I’m undone.”

Rewriting the Laws of Combustion: I burned. I rose. I molted. I chose. I churned. I learned.

I also fed Word Raccoon an album I just realized is newly out. She has opinions, but she wants to listen to it all before sharing. I just realized this may send her right back to midnight poetry writing. Hang on while I go take it back.

And just in case she wasn’t just flirting with the universe Saturday night, I set a playlist curfew last night and strictly enforced it.

It didn’t much matter. She was spent and only wrote a few lines anyway before falling asleep early. When I asked her about it she just said Meh. I have no idea what she means by that.

Oh, silly Word Raccoon. What am I going to do with you?