I am searching a bookshop
touching the spines of
tightly bound
dead trees
for cooking tips
and old Grimm’s fairy tales.
I am skimming over authors whole heartwoods,
With my cursory glance.

Once I write myself down,
will i know that no one has yet
bothered to finish reading me?

Yet still,
I keep pouring myself out into empty people,
forgetting,
again,
that everyone has different hope.

Maybe,
i just want to love insecure people
so i can blame their brokenness when they leave me.
maybe,
opposites don’t attract
and i’m just as fragile.

Still,
no one has ever held me tight enough.
no one has ever taken me to a graveyard
and said
“this is a place for you to feel sorry for yourself.”

That’s why sometimes i think i might stop writing.
because honesty is too jagged a glass
and i never signed up to be a portal
of all that’s splintered.

I can’t tell polite “how are you” faces that
I am stripping down my body this week for a poem.
tell me how much would your face twist if i said
that a line came to me yesterday and I trembled for two hours,
because that line is a fish out of water,
and I still can’t write a poem to surround it?

I am a line without my poem
I can’t have long hair because I can’t stand so many dead things coming out of my head and just hanging there.
enough people have opened my pages
and left themselves scrawled in my margins.
I won’t ever be able to small talk about the weather,
unless it’s the storm in my fist or the rain in my eyes.
but i will keep throwing out my nets to catch the gorgeous
i don’t know in my chest.
I will let it beat against me
again and again
until I make this the first time you see
anything through my eyes
like a smoothed piece of
sea glass.