messy lines

I'm very good at eavesdropping;
not so good at interjecting.
"Tell me your problems," I implore my friends
but when they ask me to reciprocate
I can only offer a sympathetic expression
and a broken,
"I can't."
No explanation for the things
even I don't know.
And there is so much I don't know,
about myself and about everyone else,
and so much no one else knows about me, either.
"You're like an iceberg," my friend told me on the bus today,
as we exchanged intermittently insults and thoughts on life,
"because you can only see a fraction of really what's there."
I guess she has a point but I'm
not an iceberg
not really.
I couldn't ever take out an unsinkable ship.
I'm nothing that strong
and my thoughts aren't that deep; there're just so many of them.
Not an ocean,
just little raindrops that fall and evaporate and
don't mean much of anything in the grand scheme of things.
Not a hurricane,
more of a November morning fog that's gone by the time you reach school
Something ghost-like --
oh, but I am not a ghost, either
I have scrapes on my elbows and blisters on my feet
(small reminders of my own mortality)
and I wear shoes that click-clack-clack on the pavement
so that everyone can hear when I walk down the hallway.
I hear my heart pounding before I open my mouth sometimes
and I suppose I live for that
both literally and figuratively.
I have no one person I can tell everything to
but I have a year's worth of secrets
pressed between pages of a notebook,
scattered over texts, scrawled in the margins of worksheets.
When people tell me I am quieter than usual
I would like to show them the inside of my mind,
and say, somehow, that
everything is a poem I cannot write
full of words I cannot quite excavate.