[merylsilverburg]

Heh, look at me posting for the first time in this forum and probably my last with all the flaming I'll receive for what I'm about to say.

eli, I do like your poem...as Rei said, it's simple and honest and I like how you left the poem up to the readers to interpret the feeling (either positive, negative, or neutral). However, to me, this poem isn't a positive one...instead, I see forms of teenage negative angst.

Being a teenager it's like flying without wings

The struggle here you're talking about is very clear; the fact you want to "fly" away, meaning freedom, but of course you're unable to do so because you have no wings to carry you away. Most teenagers want this...they want to get away, fly towards their freedom because they want to get away from all the pressures of whatever they're dealing with at home or school or whatnot. But of course, they can't. This isn't exactly positive to me.

I'ts like crying without tears

The fact that you want to let all of your emotions and struggles out through tears but unable to because you have to keep it inside in order to "move on/forward" in life. You're expressing your pain and sadness but keeping the "mask" on your face as to not show weakness towards others.

Speaking without words

Here, you want to express your thoughts, opinions, and desires, but as a mere teenager, you are supressed from expression and the fact that you are a teenager and probably unlikely to be taken seriously anyway. Or you are expressing your thoughts and feelings, but not what you truly/honestly think. Thus, speaking without words.

Feeling old without pain

Because of all the stress/pressures that life puts upon teenagers at that time, they tend to feel they experienced more than they really think. But yet, this part is being contradictive because you seem to know you haven't experienced all of the harsher and harder things in life, so you say "feeling old without pain" because you're saying you feel the "old age" involved with teenage problems, but without pain because it's not as bad as you think/or it seems.

I'ts like dying before you were born....

This phrase right here would have to be the most negative of the whole poem. When you say you die before you're born, it just means you believe you haven't even lived at all. On the day you were born, you merely went through life with that sort of "dead" and unfeeling outlook on life. Kinda similar to those people who say "whatever" to everything. This phrase is also contradictory because if you've "died" before you were born, then how can you understand what it's like to really feel, express, think, etc.? The first few in the beginning were very "expressive" and "angsty" with the whole freedom, crying, etc. but then you say "it's like dying before you're born", so how is that possible?

That's all for my analysis. Maybe I've got the whole poem wrong...maybe my impressions are just a little more negative or completely off. But, that's just how I see it. Regardless, it's still a nice poem though.