∇

Honestly

I choked on a metaphor. I tried to write a poem to say what I was thinking. I tried to write about that night as though it weren’t quite so symbolic, convincing myself jazz music was just music and lamplight was just fluorescent, tungsten if I’m feeling romantic, and that stumbling into your arms wasn’t a sign of something summer-like. But I was a poet before I could speak sentences and I fashioned finger paints from crushed sonnets, wringing out their color to test on parchment paper. This was my birthright. When I opened up my skin to see the inside I was looking for the cure to writer’s block and nothing more. I wasn’t ever one to worry about. I want to be the sane one, to say something about you that doesn’t turn me into walking symbolism. I want to stop enjambing my body to have time to press it into yours. But I’m stuck on a metaphor, dressed in villanelles and iambs. I’m dying of this disease.