Tag: free verse

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We’re masked in clever conversation. 
Witty remarks. 
Perfect metaphors. 

But poetry is not always
the set of fine china your mother
keeps locked in the cupboard. 
It is picking through skin
and meat and getting to 
the bones– sucking out the marrow. 

And sometimes it is the stench
of decaying bodies. 
Sometimes it is the taste of
someone else’s blood. 
Sometimes it is supposed to 
break you. 

And we are not flowers– we 
do not give off warm perfumes. 
Sometimes we are fingernails tearing
through the yellow wallpaper. 
Sometimes we are covered in
scars (inside and out). 
Sometimes we are our own tormentors. 
Sometimes we are the pain 
we write about. 

Don’t you see? 
I live with my hands permanently 
dirty, covered in everyone and
everything I have ever
touched. 

How The Words Get On The Page

They are all the times
i’ve been put away on a back shelf 
and collected dust. 

All the times my heart has shattered
onto the pages of my notebook and
sullied my fingers black. 

They are the words
I carve onto the pages instead
of into my skin. 

All the times I have felt
my heart was burning in the night sky
instead of in my chest. 

The times I have stood still
among hives of buzzing, 
undulating people. 

When I have been sitting
on my own bed, 
and still felt I wasn’t home. 

When I feel so restless in
my own skin 
that I swallow rainbows so I may
dissolve into darkness and wake up
forgetting. 

You’re Everywhere

You were a new coat of black
polish on my naked nails. 
I settled in quickly, not waiting for you
to dry. 
And as I touched and sat and wrote and ran
you began 
to chip away, and
in little flecks throughout our path
I have left the smallest pieces of you where
only I can find them. 

Falling Apart, Falling Together

Each day jabs its hands
inside my chest
and steals a piece of me.

I am slowly dissolving into
the air, being reassembled into a collage
of the girl that smiles at me 
on the subway and the mailman and
my high school choir director and
that piece of advice my father once told me
that I will never forget. 

I am a masterpiece, the universe’s
papier mache. She is spinning me 
on her wheel and shaping me, 
molding me. 

You Were Scared I’d Break You, But You Broke Me

Why were you so scared
to touch me? 
Did you think the fire would spread
from your fingertips to your tongue–
that I’d burn you? 
Or that I’d splinter
under your skin and bury myself
so deep, I’d be impossible
to pull out? 
Did you believe I’d shatter and
draw your precious blood? (you never
had enough blood to give)
Or were you scared
I’d pull you in closer; that you’d have nowhere
to hide? 

Spring Cleaning

Sometimes things make more sense in metaphors
and everything becomes clear 
when the dirt is out of the carpet.  

The way the stars align when the dust
lines up at the mouth 
of the dustbin. 

Sometimes questions are answered as you watch
dust fall– as you sway. 

Sometimes the first smile after 
a breakup comes while dancing with the broom
on the kitchen tile.