You've only got 100 years to live

 "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." (lines 13-16). When I was a child, I remember always having an active imagination. I remember playing make-believe with my cousin every summer until we were probably around the same age as the speaker. For us, the stairs which lead from my living room to our bedrooms upstairs could be a mountain nearly impossible to climb, or a cliff from which one or both of us was doomed to fall to our deaths. We could spend hours just making up stories together, and then one day--boom--it was all gone. 

They always say that children lose a little bit of their creativity the older they grow, and this poem is a great example of that. "It seems only yesterday I used to believe/ there was nothing under my skin but light./ If you cut me I would shine./ But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,/ I skin my knees. I bleed" (lines 28-32). This passage of the poem acts as a great metaphor. It makes me think of that cheesy saying "I wish I could go back to being a little kid again. Skinned knees are so much easier to mend than broken hearts." However, after reading this section of the poem, I realize that the speaker does not mean that he always literally bleeds--it just means that as he grows older and begins to understand his surroundings better, he will start to feel emotional pain--he will no longer be above destruction. 

On the whole, I think this poem spoke to me stronger than the other poems, simply because of where I am in my life right now. I'm gonna be 20 years old in about six months, and it terrifies me. Come to think of it, I still remember my 4th grade teacher saying to us on one of the first days of school to enjoy our year, because from then on, time was going to fly by--and she was right. That was the year I turned 10, and I honestly feel like the past 9 and a half years have just zoomed past me. They always say to enjoy it while you can, but it seems like we can't even appreciate that saying until we're older. This poem really hit home for me, because I already feel like time is moving too quickly for me. I still wake up almost every day and think to myself, "wow, I'm not a college freshman anymore. I feel...old."