On Turning [Twenty-three]
By: Billy Collins [and me]

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
[Actually I am - my throat is sore,
I'm sneezing and coughing, and
I have a rundown feeling that must
be the very poetic-sounding malaise.]
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
["Chicken Pox of the Soul" - now
that's a collection I'd like on my bookshelf.]

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
[or they tell me it is too early to be looking so far forward],
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
[And the hopeless melancholy that comes with fourteen.]
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
[And the backyard swing snapped broken,
spurning me like my first boyfriend
had done the previous day.]

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
[I'd say this is the beginning of more madness.]
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
[This stanza alone is what made me love
this poem years ago when I was still at
home, still in high school, wondering what
I'd be like now.]