Poet, writer, & goblin herder

it was somewhere

off of north monroe

beside the little gallery

some indifferent, nonsense name

evoking color or medium

where an outsider, on a stint

for possession with intent,

had painted his father again and again

an expressionless muse

in watercolors

in a cafe, laden with perfumes,

earthen darks and heavy cream,

the smoke-sweet of chilean red

a calming cling of herb on winter clothes,

where Either/Or was playing,

that sad and silken voice,

a grave accompaniment

for the college crowd, while we said

our piece in our brief hours,

a love, a death, an ache of isolation,

a congregation of verses

declared in many rhythms

and varying cadence

a song, sung by all

to no one

an occasional door chime sounded

revealing outside, where our words

were lost

in the penitent sigh of evening traffic

and footsteps, hastened by cold,

upon the sidewalk, blind

to our desperate meaninglessness,

another night in slow descent,

her hair fell wrong in all the right ways strands caught in her lashes like secrets to wish upon

when she looked up the room shifted slightly not enough to notice unless you were already falling into her

A poltergeist hidden somewhere I will never be able to visit; who knocks over my things just to say, “I exist in spite of your healing. Let me remind you how precious a thing can be by ripping it right from your grasp.”

I heard its voice the other night; smoke at the foot of my bed where all the bad dreams play like a film of my life, and the good dreams feel like fictitious hauntings of their own.

Both things can be true at once: the healing and the haunting. In fact, I have almost always been contradictory.

I am a poet, but can never seem to carry the words correctly. I am a man, but can never seem to notice him in the mirror. I want freedom from this place, but can never seem to reach for opportunities aside from rotting in a bed in a place I can’t quite make feel like home.

And the worst one yet: I want love in a vicious, feral, disgusting way, but can never seem to find it. And even if it found me, I would cower and bite until I scared it away.

I don’t reach for astrology the way I do for words, but the stars tell me I was a hermit once.

Apparently, the stars themselves know more than I do about my past lives, but won’t offer instructions for how to stop or how to let people in when my twenty-three years in this lifetime taught me how much safer it is to be alone.

I don’t want to be alone forever, but I know I have the tendency to be nonexistent. To disappear when I am expected to be human. To fall helpless to myself when people are waiting for me to keep giving.

It is a daily struggle back and forth with this ghost. When will I be loved? When will something other than my own hands hold me steady? When will life feel worth living?

But the calendar doesn’t change. It just repeats me. And by me, I mean you could map me by the places I stopped asking for such things and instead started believing in accumulation more than arrival.

It is a petrifying realization to bear when you conclude that the biggest fear you’ve been cowering from this whole time is really just your current life.

I am exactly as alone as I’ve been afraid of. I have survived every version of this without noticing. It does not make it less heavy.

There is no event surrounding it. It is just the room I wake up in. I was building it this whole time with my own bare hands.

I am alone. I am living my biggest fear. I am tired of redecorating the walls. My heart beats on continuity instead of life, and I am chronically sick with it.

happy world poetry day!!! to celebrate i’m giving you a list of poetry prompts for april, aka poetry month aka #escapril 🧚‍♀️ they’re based on poems from my collection which is out april 14!!!