writing myself

all the poems in my head are hurting now

and i can’t sleep for trying to figure out

how to place my body 

into syntax – into phrases with accurately used comma and 

A CAPITAL LETTER AT THE BEGINNING OF MY NAME 

and the start of every line –

into something that i mean and won’t change my mind about tomorrow.

i try but can’t seem to make myself into something pretty that i can bear to type out and have looked at – not with all the letters looking so wrong when it’s me threading them together.

 

maybe if they were italicised, leaning slightly

away from life? or written in bold, or if i were only able to underline them all, 

as though they were each for a purpose, real and certain.

i marvel at your soliloquies,

where you never crave knowing 

what it feels like

to be both art,

and muse, and a reason to keep being.

because you already seem to know you are.

and i, breathing, in and out once again, depending upon your interrogation so desperately, just so i know you see me still.

 

all the words that mean the things i need them to are ugly ones,

the ones that have no place in poetry

but make you stay awake at night to write it. the breaks 

in 

my

line all show too much 

of the things i don’t like and can’t change no matter how

i delete and edit and search online

for synonyms to make me flow more

Neatly.

 

my hands hang in the ‘apostrophe’, my legs fast-sink in the ellipses that i leave…

the silence where you wait for me to speak

only to find i have no mouth;

my heart the rhythm of

your reading, knowing to stop when

you do.

writing myself, i think, means only trying not to prise myself open again

tonight –

skin like curtains

just to find out the secret,

of how to stay here for one long second longer

and let a little more light in.

 

and so i will not finish this