This is not a poem by Hunter Golder (17, Pennsylvania)

I am a watcher,
through four panes
and silver screens.

The bad days are not like in the movies. 
I still rise from bed
and drift to and fro,
like a middle-class phantom.
I call them my "sad days."

---

All the while, the world, oh the world,
it passes me by from my window.
I am the center of the universe,
not out of arrogance,
but like the eye of a hurricane:
a black hole of stillness,
a refusal of action,
a singularity, solemn serenity, 
a watcher--
a watcher of clouds that drift me on by.

My life is a compilation of shower grout,
half-melted snow, and hangnails
that I'm too afraid to fully tear off.

My head is full of ideas
that never convey on the page.
I write under the crushing weight
of an audience who does not exist.
I imagine each poem,
perfectly mournful, mournfully imperfect,
as the one remnant of my existence people centuries from now will remember me by.

I exacerbate my sadness 
to make something worthwhile. 
I am raw so people will call me raw.
I put my feelings into metaphors
to make them seem smarter and profound. 
These are not metaphors;
this is not a poem.

If it was worth the pen strokes, 
I'd be an elegy.
If it was worth the brush strokes,
I'd be a masterpiece. 
But the "sad days" are not 
painted in blues or greys, as they say,
but in the morose browns of 
my shower tiles and dead skin.

I have found that when I cry, 
no one stops and watches;
hear me sigh like an apparition,
fogging up the one-way glass of my pain.
My tears aren't eye-catching, 
nor are they worth their weight in gold.
They melt quickly like slush,
dregs of last week's snow, 
pierced by grass green blades of indifference: seven days ago fallen, six days ago forgotten.
Grief is rarely, if ever, worth the strain of immortalization. 

And my sadness, my sadness,
dim under its umber glow,
has never posed well for a picture;
brown has never been my color, and
God knows that my mother bore an ugly crier
with an Achilles glint in his eye.