The Dessert

It's sweet and fluffy, rich and tall.
This fine dessert can cream them all.
It's only seven layers high,
This chocolate peanut butter pie.

The whipped cream makes a mound on top.
Once you start, you'll never stop.
Chocolate columns, peanut piles,
This perfect pie is simply wild.

I take a large decadent bite,
But the end of my slice is nowhere in sight.
I drop my fork and start to sigh.
I've been whipped by a small slice of pie.

If you're not drooling, then there's something wrong with you.

25 Random Things that Make Me the Strange Person I am

1. I love high-heeled boots. Or any kind of boots.
2. My friends think that looking something up in the dictionary is asking me what a word means.
3. I have 526 songs on my MP3 player.
4. I have never been in a wedding.
5. I have roasted and eaten roasted Cheetos. (and they're really really good.)
6. I am the worst seam ripper in the history of sewing.
7. I once wore a dress made out of a tablecloth (not out in public, of course.)
8. I have a pair of penguin earrings.
9. I want a huge pair of hoop earrings.
10. My favorite Wii sport is bowling.
11. I love popping bubble wrap.
12. I don't think museums are boring.
13. I have a shoebox filled with manuscripts and my pre-author stage writings. (I really need a bigger shoebox.)
14. I like multiplying and dividing with fractions.
15. I have broken or lost three necklaces at school. (all ones I really liked, too.)
16. I am currently growing my hair out.
17. I sometimes base my book characters on real people.
18.We used to have fish. Most of them died about a month after we got them.
19. If I try really hard, I can sing like Christine from The Phantom of the Opera. (sort of.)
20. I have a huge stuffed tiger in my room.
21. I like stamping with my mom.
22. I collect business cards, quotes, and cool pens.
23. I have a Lego guy named Leroy.
24. I read the newspaper after school.
25. I want to go white-water rafting, scuba-diving, and rapelling someday.

Shadows of a Playhouse
In the backstage catacombs
Where children used to play,
I now see only shadows
Left from yesterday.
Where once a ragged urchin sat,
There’s just a plain old wall.
And where a someday author wrote,
There’s nothing there at all.
Where sparkles used to linger,
Now there’s naught but dirt.
I think of happy, gone-on days
And my heart begins to hurt.
Where we smiled and practiced lines
There’s shadows, nothing more--
Shadows of students and children,
Shadows of props on the floor.
We thought we were inseparable,
But good things rarely last.
Once life was a fairy tale,
But our glory days are past.
--R. E. Mayes
Feb. 2009

This poem is about my experience as Want, the street urchin in A Christmas Carol at Maranatha. After you've taken your final bow, the cast still remembers each other, still might keep in touch, but when you go back and see how much has changed, it can really be depressing.